further details:
Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales
A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/10/frances-answer-to-stargate-macron-announces-ai-investment.html
Ah yes, politics as a driving force for technological innovation. This time it’ll work. 😒
I think the saddest thing here is that Europe has no capital markets union where it’s own private companies should be putting this money in
Europe will always be behind while it’s more difficult to raise funds and do business
This AI is just the latest thing, who knows what else Europe will soon fall behind in
That, I think, is a symptom not a cause.
The cause is societal: the EU thinks that innovation should come top down. By giving established corporations subsidies, and a large administration that steers everyone every step of the way. To make sure nobody does anything out of the ordinary.
That works if you want to improve car crash safety by 5%. But, ofcourse, that doesn’t work for true, novel ideas. Concensus being antagonistic to novelty.
And it’s not solely a “bad politicians” problem. A majority of Europeans are simply afraid of change, want their 9-to-5 job to look exactly the same for their whole life. The elected reflect their electorate.
Too bad the world changes regardless of you participating.
That is why Europe also has to be on the forefront of wellfair and social protection : there is a lot less risk into innovating if losing your job is less of an issue and if it preserves your ability to spend thus avoiding a hard recession. That’s something EU countries are better at than the US and on which it should capitalise (no pun intended).
What does that look like?
In France, where I live, good unemployement (keeping arround 80% of your previous revenues during a year or two) and health benefits (100% coverage if you have a, relatively cheap, additional individual insurance). Which has the added benefit of keeping medecine prices pretty low (ie insulin is free for diabetics here and doesn’t cost much if you pay for it yourself).
It should, and could, be even better if they trusted beneficiaries a bit more, and were not constantly harrasing them into accepting shity jobs.
When you earn unemployement benefits, you still pay taxes and the rest of the money you spend keeps the national economy running (which, in turn, also turn in taxes) so financing it isn’t necessarely an issue and hasn’t been for decades (even without taxing the 10% wealthiest who manage to mostly avoid it and thus, don’t contribute. While their wealth doubled in the last 20 years, taking inflation into account).
The constant political fight arround those spendings is mostly about the morality of “assisting” unemployed and poor families not an economical balance matter.
That I know, I live in Belgium.
I wonder what successful capitalisation of that would look like?
One way would be to higher EU members’ financial contribution to it’s budget in proportion to their lack of wellfairness. I also frequently dream of tariffs on extra-EU imports on the same criteria, thus also preventing so called “social dumping”, modern slavery and exploitation. Which in turn would make our own production more competitive and enable better salaries overall.
Of course, a lot of goods would get more expensive, but we would finaly pay a fair price (rewarding those who until now payed with their health/liberty/life for those low prices). Unfortunately, I think it will keep beeing a dream for quite a while (if not ever)…
That’s the topic of this post: due to it’s central steering EU became technologically (and in a few decades economically) irrelevant. It doesn’t know how to make 21st century things. Tarrifs don’t help with that problem, au contraire. Nor does a national social security system. The latter does make sure that everyone’s quality of life degrades about equally fast.
The EU doesn’t think. A cell of the organism doesn’t think in organ matters, an organ doesn’t think in cell matters.
The EU is just built this way, it’s a union of national governments against anything too mobile or evolutionary in their populations. It’s a confederation designed so that there’ll never be a federation of the same countries. Evolutionary mechanisms devour bureaucracies. But bureaucracies can strangle them.