Europe spent decades outsourcing its digital infrastructure to US companies because it was cheap and convenient. Now everyone is shocked to discover that dependence creates leverage. A US tech kill switch doesn’t even need to be used: the possibility alone is reason enough for Europe to build its own stack.

Absolutely. Europe doesn’t lack ideas or founders: it lacks one deep, liquid capital market. A real Capital Markets Union could let European savings fund European scaleups instead of watching them head to New York for serious growth capital.

Germany quietly setting startup records while everyone keeps insisting Europe can’t innovate is pretty funny. The real test comes next though: founding 3,000 companies is great, but if the successful ones still need to move to the US to raise serious growth capital, Germany has only solved half the problem.

It’s easy to underestimate how different these facilities are: Traditional data centres are built to run millions of separate workloads efficiently. AI data centres are engineered to make tens of thousands of GPUs act like one giant supercomputer. The building may look similar, but the power, cooling, networking and economics are almost an entirely different industry.

The market is fragmented across the Member States, each of which conducts its own research. That is precisely what needs to change. Hopefully, this approach will work.

This is a significant step for Europe’s AI ambitions. Access to large scale compute has become one of the biggest barriers to building competitive AI models. If executed well, these gigafactories could give European startups, researchers, and companies the infrastructure they need to innovate at home instead of relying almost entirely on US or Chinese providers.

This is why media ownership matters: When the people deciding what gets amplified are also celebrating political power brokers, it becomes harder to separate journalism from influence. Even if Politico’s newsroom stays independent, the optics alone are enough to make readers question where the lines really are.

Because digital sovereignty isn’t a job title, it’s a procurement strategy: The hiring shows up as cloud engineers, cybersecurity, Linux, semiconductor, networking, public sector IT and compliance roles. The money is real, but it mostly flows through existing industries rather than creating a shiny new profession.

Don’t forget his real name: TACO. 🤡

Climate change brings hotter temperatures, drier vegetation and longer heatwaves that turn fires that might have been manageable into disasters that overwhelm entire regions. Europe needs to stop treating these as exceptional summers. They’re becoming the new baseline.

Apparently long enough for a Finnish town. The technologies aren’t really competitors: They’re complementary technologies for different jobs.

Exactly. That’s what makes it so compelling. No scarce minerals, no exotic chemistry, no billion Euro manufacturing plants. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones.

The »kill switch« debate exists because the US proved it could flip one: Even if the restriction was temporary, it reminded governments and businesses that access to critical AI can depend on political decisions made in Washington. That’s exactly why digital sovereignty, OWAI for AI sovereignty in particular, has gone from a niche concern to a strategic priority.

A giant thermal battery storing heat instead of electricity is exactly the kind of engineering we need more of. It won’t replace lithium batteries or solve every energy problem, but district heating is a huge source of emissions in cold countries. Sometimes the smartest climate tech isn’t flashy AI: it’s hot rocks and good physics. 💪😎✌️

Every time someone says »it’s just the border,« the surveillance footprint quietly grows. Infrastructure built for one purpose has a remarkable habit of finding new ones. A billion dollars buys a lot of cameras, and history suggests the mission rarely stays as narrow as the sales pitch. 🤨

If the price of visa free travel is giving a foreign government access to Europeans’ biometric data, then it’s a bad deal: The EU lectures the world about privacy and digital sovereignty, yet too often folds when Washington asks for another exception!

Europe keeps announcing »digital sovereignty« while handing its most valuable data, AI workloads, and cloud infrastructure to American hyperscalers: You don’t achieve independence by subsidizing chip factories while renting your digital future from foreign tech giants! That’s dependence with better PR.

The surrogacy story is a distraction. Spahn’s real credibility problem is the mask deal scandal: billions spent, dubious contracts, missing transparency, and taxpayers left carrying the risk. Resigning over the side issue while dodging accountability for the main one would be peak political theatre.

If even the EU starts slowing climate measures, it risks sending the message that every target is negotiable. Businesses need predictable rules, not repeated delays. The longer emissions cuts are postponed, the steeper and more expensive they’ll ultimately become.

The issue isn’t whether wealthy people try to influence politics: many do. The distinction is what they’re promoting. Equating support for mainstream democratic parties with support for parties or movements accused of undermining democratic institutions erases an important difference. ‘Rich people spend money on politics’ is the similarity. The political goals and consequences are where the comparison breaks down.