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I had a pub argument with a friend the other day. He was saying, what’s the point in the UK Government investing billions of pounds into AI infrastructure when we can simply hire what we need from a data centre somewhere else in the world? After all, our electricity and staff costs are high. Surely it doesn’t make sense to build it ourselves, in the same way we don’t make phones?
What happened next surprised me: I put together a passionate argument for sovereignty, for the advantage it gives us as a country, and that this investment was as important for the country as every other key infrastructure – water, road, rail, the internet.
My passion has at least in part been ignited by my visit in July to Bristol. “The UK,” I wrote, “has entered the AI supercomputer age with Isambard-AI, unveiled today at an official ceremony at the University of Bristol.”
I didn’t do the hobnobbing with politicians part, preferring instead to take a tour of the facility and seeing exactly what had cost so much money. It’s both impressive and mundane: if you’ve visited any data centre then you know what buzzing servers look like. It’s just that these happen to contain 1,028,160 compute cores.
Britain isn’t the only country in Europe to bring a new AI supercomputer online this year. We’ve also seen Jupiter in Germany, Europe’s first exascale computer, a far more powerful system that slipped in at number four in the world’s TOP500 supercomputers list. Isambard-AI could only claim 11th spot.
But the USA continues to dominate, capturing four of the other top five slots, with the premier spot going to El Capitan which was officially launched in January 2025. Oh, and the United States is also home to the companies that hold the all-important IP that we rely on to build our supercomputers.
In the increasingly chaotic world, one where Europe – including the UK – can no longer place unconditional trust in the USA, it’s a sharp reminder of how far we’ve fallen behind when it comes to technology.
So where does Europe go from here? Well, we are world leaders in legislation.
Every year, the BBC invites a prominent thinker or scientist to present a series of lectures on Radio 4. The tradition, called The Reith Lectures in honour of the BBC’s founder Lord Reith, dates back to 1948 when legendary Bertrand Russell (one of my own heroes thanks to his book, Conjectures and Refutations) presented the first series.
This year’s Reith lecturer is Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian and author of Humankind, who explores the “moral decay and un-seriousness of today’s elites”. In one part, he also touches upon the near-irrelevance of the EU as it attempts to legislate.
“Today, the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open-air museum, a great destination for Chinese and American tourists, a place to admire what, was once the centre of the world,” he says in the first lecture. He goes on to mention that “all the American giants, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet, are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market”. Our biggest brands are from the world of fashion.
But his killer point came a minute or two later: “We proudly announced our AI Act to the world, even though we had no frontier AI companies to speak of. We’re brilliant at governing industries that we don’t have.”
This is perhaps the biggest take to come out of 2025. That we continue to fail – and “fail” is the only word – to produce companies that lead the way. Our brightest minds flee to America where they will be rewarded, with our governments seemingly unable to gamble big in the way that the US can.
Now, as someone who published a book this year all about the birth of the computing industry, with the UK at one time ahead of the USA only to feebly submit to its cross-Atlantic rival in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I know this is not new behaviour. But Europe keeps on forgetting how big it is, how rich it is in both resources and well-trained minds.
One reason for this capitulation is that much of Europe has signed up to the Trump manifesto of making America great again. At the same time, we seem unable to make ourselves great again without veering into far right (and far left) territory of neo-fascism. There’s nothing wrong with being patriotic and attempting to make your own country “great again”, but all our mainstream politicians are so afraid of seeming too “woke” or too fascist that they end up simply appearing indecisive and ineffectual.
Donald Trump has no such issues. Love him or loathe him, he’s prepared to say what he thinks, even if that means changing his mind a few minutes, hours, days later. He has charisma and he has the full weight of the American political apparatus behind him – an apparatus that he’s willing to bend to his will without worrying about legal niceties.
All of this, a mix of tariff sticks and tax-break carrots, means that it’s far more attractive to set up manufacturing companies in the USA than it is in Europe. And the EU’s myriad leaders are so distracted by political threats in their own territories that they are unable to look to the long-term .
This is what we need to learn from Trump. Many of his “make America great again” tactics are positioning the US to long-term strength: it will be home to factories, to IP creators, to the frontier AI companies that Bregman spoke of, while Europe remains fractured and distracted.
While Iain Thomson, in his own Letter from America, points out that we’re yet to see much sign of IT manufacturing shifting from China to USA, I’m willing to bet that any factory relocations in the next 1-2 years will far outnumber those to Europe.
I’d love to end by pointing to green shoots for 2026, but I must be honest: I can’t see them.
Yes, a few more AI supercomputers will come online, and there will be hundreds of advances as a result – companies creating great products, health breakthroughs, leaps forward in university-based research – but these won’t be unique to Europe.
Our leaders need to understand that we’re all in a marathon where the front-runners, China and the USA, steadily grow their lead. They have the equivalent of better shoes, better diets, better training facilities.
Our brightest minds will do what is naturally the best for them: move to the USA. It’s no land of milk and honey, but boy does it reward entrepreneurs with great ideas. We, as a continent, need to stop navel-gazing and start rewarding.
