This is Brian McGleenon, Global Head of News at BeInCrypto.
I was at this week’s The Economist’s Commercialising Quantum Global summit in London, and after conversations with European deep-tech founders, I began to wonder whether quantum computing could be Europe’s way to entirely bypass Silicon Valley in the next phase of the AI race.
To understand how this is a possibility worth considering, we must first look at the brutal asymmetric dependencies trapping the the UK and the EU right now:
Sovereignty Power Asymmetry: At the recent G7 summit lunch in Évian, the United States was flanked by five of its dominant domestic frontier AI giants: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Salesforce, and Meta (represented alongside Scale AI). By contrast, the remaining G7 nations and invited allies had only a single domestic firm representing each of their respective flags at the table, including France’s Mistral AI, the UK’s Synthesia, Canada’s Cohere, Germany’s Black Forest Labs, Japan’s Sakana AI, India’s Sarvam AI, and Italy’s Domyn.
The Continental Infrastructure Gap: Europe currently relies on foreign, primarily American, architecture for an estimated 80% of its overall digital infrastructure.
The Cloud Lock-In: When it comes to critical cloud computing and data storage, the dependency is absolute, soaring past 90% reliance on just a few dominant US-based hyperscalers.
While the public conversation remains completely fixated on Silicon Valley’s monopoly over first-generation large language models and massive GPU data centers, classical-computing AI is hitting a wall of compute scale and power-grid exhaustion.
The antidote to Europe’s AI lag lies in the architecture being engineered right now by its domestic deep-tech champions: Quantum Machine Learning (QML). By merging Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) nodes directly with classical high-performance computing (HPC) stacks, European startups are achieving multi-dimensional processing breakthroughs.
This paradigm shift entirely bypasses the need for hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, specialized nuclear power plants, and the astronomical electricity and water-cooling infrastructure required to keep modern data centers alive.
The geopolitical consequences of the AI-sovereignty imbalance between the US and the EU is beginning to materialise. The fallout from the Trump administration’s sudden decision to block close foreign allies from accessing Anthropic’s most advanced models (Fable 5 and Mythos 5) has sent shockwaves through European leadership.
For years, Europe operated on a comfortable assumption of transatlantic alignment. The reality on the ground is far bleaker: the G7 summit has turned what was a quiet structural vulnerability into a loud, flashing national security crisis. European hospitals, research centers, and government bodies are waking up to the reality that their operational continuity is entirely hostage to political swings of Donald Trump, plus the un-elected tech barons that sit behind him.
In response, the European Commission is moving aggressively with its Tech Sovereignty Package and InvestAI initiatives, pouring billions into “AI Factories” and semiconductor infrastructure.
The path to European autonomy might not be found by subsidising a poor imitation of Silicon Valley, but by hyper-charging the industrial and tech giants that Europe already has, and treating them as sovereign national security assets.
This requires a highly coordinated industrial ecosystem:
ASML: Their monopoly on Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines means the US cannot manufacture a single advanced AI chip without Dutch technology.
Nokia & Ericsson: Controlling the physical 5G and future 6G telecommunications supply chains, providing the secure, encrypted nervous system for distributed computing.
Siemens & Airbus: The physical implementers, weaving localized AI directly into advanced manufacturing, industrial automation, and defense aerospace.
SAP & Mistral AI: Driving the logical layer, building the proprietary enterprise software and open-source frontier models that keep data sovereign, localized, and out of foreign jurisdictions.
If the EU utilises these industrial titans as a strategic bargaining chip while aggressively integrating domestic quantum processors from the likes of Pasqal or IQM into its new supercomputing hubs, it can move beyond theoretical input and actively impact global tech governance. It forces Europe to grow from a “shiny regulator” passing laws into a hardened, self-sufficient technological superpower.
With this in mind, keep an eye out this July for a special episode of the BeInCrypto Future Tech Expert Council podcast.
We will tackle the critical question many global commentators ignore: In the era of AI, what has structurally happened to the sovereignty of nations outside the US and China, and can it ever be recovered? Tune in as we dissect how the technological, financial, and cognitive infrastructures of independent nations have been effectively captured by a stateless coalition of capital and commercial interests, and how we can fight to win it back.
On the latest BeInCrypto Market Intelligence Expert Council, Poland Editor-in-Chief Jakub Dziadkowiec sits down with Charles Edwards (Founder of Capriole Investments) and Julio Moreno (Head of Research at CryptoQuant).
Together, they deliver the most honest breakdown you’ll find anywhere on how sophisticated institutional investors actually utilize on-chain data, and why 99% of dashboard metrics are just noise.
Stay tuned, and stay safe,
Brian McGleenon
Global Head of News, BeInCrypto
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.