Europe should build a European compute platform scaled to its economy and values, prioritizing affordable shared infrastructure, reliable power, accelerated capital, strong technical support, and alignment with real-world economic needs rather than pursuing autonomy from global players.

Effective policy requires a hybrid funding-and-market approach that stabilizes public demand while attracting private investment, enables open access, defines practical deployment pathways, and establishes clear governance across frontier capacity, enterprise computing, and public-benefit computing.

Energy and electricity are central to compute for AI, with data centers competing for power; policies must integrate AI data centers with green power, grid planning, and faster permitting to sustain growth.

Access-based governance should prioritize availability and affordability of compute over ownership, implementing cross-border, digitized procurement with transparent energy use and security standards.

The shift in digital sovereignty focuses on access to physical infrastructure, so Europe must secure reliable compute to influence its AI development and outcomes.

The approach distinguishes three compute uses: frontier capacity for large-model training and testing, broad access for business use, and public-benefit computing for research and civic services, each with tailored costs and rules.

Policy should set measurable targets with tiered access rather than simply chasing funding totals, ensuring researchers, startups, public agencies, and large users have timely access while avoiding lock-in and over-reliance on a few providers.

Europe should adopt a living, continuously renewing compute strategy that updates hardware, expands access, and monitors usage and cost, drawing lessons from broader industrial strategies while avoiding static, one-off projects.

Europe faces an AI compute gap threatening its ability to build, train, and deploy frontier models due to limited access to cutting-edge chips, data centers, green electricity, and cloud capacity.

Europe’s strengths include world-class research and a unified market, but fragmentation in power pricing, thinner capital markets, and reliance on external infrastructure hinder scale and control.