Mario Draghi: Europe’s AI bet is also a sovereignty bet
What's the deal? In a Financial Times op-ed highlighted by economist and former MEP Luis GaricanoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → on September 11, 2026, Mario DraghiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → argues that Europe needs faster productivity growth to sustain its social model. He presents artificial intelligence as the continent’s strongest opportunity to raise productivity, while warning that reliance on the US and China makes the opportunity a question of economic sovereignty as well as technology.
Why now? Draghi’s argument places AI inside Europe’s wider competitiveness debate. The challenge is not simply whether European businesses can use AI, but whether Europe can build enough of the underlying infrastructure and capability to avoid becoming dependent on systems, capital, and compute controlled elsewhere.
What could go wrong? Europe may struggle to turn its research, data, and industrial base into scalable AI capacity. Fragmented demand and insufficient investment could leave European companies consuming foreign infrastructure rather than helping finance a competitive domestic ecosystem.
The signal: The proposals highlighted by Garicano include building European compute capacity, making better use of Europe’s data advantage, and pooling corporate demand to create the scale needed to finance it. The message is a call for coordinated action: productivity, infrastructure, and sovereignty are increasingly part of the same AI policy conversation.
Sources:
Luis Garicano on X
