News

After the recent concerns expressed by students in France, and before turning our attention, once again, to what is happening across the Atlantic, here is some encouraging news from Europe. Who would have thought that the owner of Lidl could become one of the architects of Europe’s AI sovereignty? Yet this is precisely what Germany’s…

Recent student protests in France, echoed in other European countries, have left me with an uncomfortable question. Overcrowded classrooms. Crumbling school buildings. Missing teachers. Young people increasingly worried about their future. Their concerns deserve to be heard. Violence is never the answer, but neither is ignoring the frustration behind it. Of course, these immediate problems…

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, recently challenged Europe to enter the AI race before worrying about staying in it. Fair point. But look at this week’s announcements. 🇫🇷 NVIDIA is investing in Doctolib, bringing AI deeper into European healthcare. 🇪🇺 Siemens is investing in Skeleton Technologies, an Estonian-founded company developing energy-storage solutions for AI infrastructure. Two…

Perhaps I was slightly unfair. Because while I was questioning Europe’s ability to think beyond the next election, European entrepreneurs, engineers and investors were already busy building the future. Just look at the past few days. In France, HyPrSpace is developing new rocket propulsion technology and building industrial capacity near Bordeaux. In Germany, RobCo has…

Today is German Unity Day. A good day to remember that sometimes politics can achieve things that once seemed impossible. And perhaps also a good day for a coup de gueule as we say in French ! Over the last few months, I have tried in my posts to find reasons to be optimistic about…

In my last post, I argued that Europe’s AI opportunity may not only be about owning the screen — but owning enough of what sits behind it. Chips. Compute. Energy. Industrial software. Infrastructure. But why does this matter? Perhaps because it leads to a much bigger question: What does European sovereignty actually mean? For me,…

In my last post, I wrote about AI leaving the screen and entering the physical world. Factories.Warehouses.Buildings.Energy systems.Satellites. But that raises another question. What sits behind all this intelligence? Chips. Computing power. Data centres. Energy. Cloud infrastructure. Industrial software. And increasingly, the ability to connect all these layers. This week, Dutch startup Axelera AI launched…

A few days ago, I wrote that AI becomes really interesting when it leaves the screen. Since then, the news has almost been making the case for me. In France, Mistral has raised €3 billion to accelerate not only AI models, but infrastructure and deployment into real organisations. In Europe, new investment is flowing into…

In my previous post, I asked: What if European Tech is not dying — but maturing? Perhaps one of the best places to look for an answer is Artificial Intelligence. Most of the AI conversation today is dominated by what happens on our screens. Chatbots.Generative AI.Large Language Models. Fascinating, certainly. But from my industrial perspective,…

Back from the summer break, with lots of things happening in the French startups landcape like Pasqal IPOs at the Nasdaq and raising $280m, or Mistral signing a large contract with Saudi Arabia, I wanted to start with some numbers and put things in perspective. We hear a lot about Europe’s inability to compete with…