Draghi tells Europe to build AI data centres — it holds 5% of compute
Two stories out of this week's Inclusion Conference and the European policy pages: Mario Draghi is back with an industrial plan, and Ant is quietly proving that the agent business is sold deal by deal.
Mario Draghi is calling for a large-scale buildout of AI data centres inside Europe, arguing that sovereignty over data is now a growth question rather than a regulatory one. The former Italian prime minister and ex-ECB president published a long essay this week urging the bloc to stop depending on American cloud for inference, and the numbers behind the plea are worse than the rhetoric: a Bruegel policy brief estimates Europe's AI compute capacity at roughly 2 gigawatts in 2026, about 5% of the global total, against roughly 35 GW in the United States (78%) and 5 GW in China (11%). Even if global AI compute grows more than eightfold by 2031, Bruegel's authors project Europe's share creeping up only to about 5.6%. The uncomfortable detail is that the money is not the binding constraint — the European data-centre industry's own 2026 survey puts the blockers on grid readiness and permitting, not private capital, and the five AI gigafactories the Commission is funding add up to around 750 megawatts, roughly 4% of the 21 GW Bruegel models Europe will need in 2031. The brief's most actionable claim is also the least glamorous: shave a single year off infrastructure consent processes and Europe's 2031 share rises to about 6.7%. That lands a week after the bloc's first concrete site — Nokia gives Europe's AI gigafactory a street address — so Draghi is arguing into a debate that has already moved from white papers to land purchases. The read: Europe's compute gap is a construction-permit problem dressed as an industrial-policy problem, and no amount of InvestAI money changes the arithmetic until approval clocks do.
Ant Digital Technologies closed 31 partnerships at the Inclusion Conference in Shanghai, spanning green energy, smart terminals, hotels and tourism, and digital content. The individual deals are unglamorous — AI power-trading and storage assets on-chain in energy, robot-staffed retail kiosks and industrial AI glasses on the device side, an AI hotel concierge and ticketing agent in tourism, and a joint copyright model with Fujian-based Vobile covering text-to-video and short-drama work. What adds up is the shape of the strategy: Ant is not selling model access, it is embedding agents into workflows that already have invoices attached, alongside its Agentar enterprise-agent platform and the Lingbo robotics "brain" it demoed sorting medicine in an 80-centimetre pharmacy aisle. Ant Digital's chief executive Zhao Wenbiao told the conference that the unit's overall business grew close to 50% a year over the past two years, with AI enterprise revenue growing at triple-digit rates. The honest caveat comes from Ant's own leadership: asked whether the agentic-commerce "ChatGPT moment" he predicted was visible in the company's backend data, Ant's Han Xinyi answered that it was not.
What to watch: whether the Commission's Cloud and AI Development Act actually commits to the 18-month permitting target, and which consortiums make the gigafactory shortlist.
Is Europe's AI compute gap fixable by permits and power lines, or is the train already gone? Tell us in the comments.
