The silent decline

When europe watches the innovation train pass by

IMPORTANT: This article is long, very long, and peppered with references for those who like to verify the numbers. So, if you’re in a hurry or simply resistant to texts that exceed a quarter of a page, here’s the essence in one minute. Otherwise, scroll down a bit to read the full article.

A few decades ago, people would readily laugh at this somewhat easy formula: “Americans invent, the Chinese copy, Europeans regulate.” It was funny, almost flattering, a way of reminding ourselves that we, Europeans, were the guardians of rigor and morality in a world that was too hasty.

But time has passed, and the laughter has faded. What was yesterday a cliché has become the precise photograph of a continent in the process of marginalizing itself.

Europe is losing, quietly, the global race for artificial intelligence and innovation. The United States invents, finances, and dominates: more than $100 billion invested in AI in 2024, compared to less than $10 billion for China and mere crumbs for Europe.

China, for its part, no longer copies. It has taken control of global production chains, from robotics to semiconductors, including electric batteries. While Washington advances through decisions and Beijing through five-year plans, Brussels is still debating the implementation procedures of the next regulation.

The European Union perfects its legal arsenal like a disarmed police officer, without industrial strategy or common vision. France, meanwhile, likes to tell itself that it’s resisting, like a Gaulish village surrounded by giants. Mistral AI shines, Paris attracts, but more than half of French capital flees to the United States, and with it, the best talent.

The result is cruel: a continent that regulates what it no longer produces, dependent on American clouds and Asian supply chains. The risk is no longer theoretical. It now bears a name: that of a digital colony, a mere consumer of technologies designed elsewhere, deprived of sovereignty over its data, its infrastructure, and even its minds.

Yet, all is not lost. Europe can still reverse course, provided it finally connects regulation to an industrial strategy, invests massively, and unifies its fragmented markets.

But the innovation train won’t wait. And those still debating the color of the wagons will soon watch history pass by. Yet nothing is written. Civilizations don’t decline, they fall asleep. And Europe, if it found the courage to act, could still turn its delay into strength, as it has done so many times before. Provided it dares to get back on the train instead of commenting on its speed.

TL;DR complete! Now for the full article…

… For those who have the courage to read it in its entirety.

PRELIMINARY NOTE: TL;DR stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read, literally “too long, didn’t read.” It’s an ultra-condensed summary placed at the beginning of an article to deliver the essence. In the age of lightning-fast content, texts have become like miniskirts: short enough to capture attention, but long enough to cover the essentials. (But soon, in the era of intellectual smoothing and almost uniform thinking, there may not even be any essentials left…)

Europe didn’t lose the innovation battle for lack of talent, but from an excess of caution.

There was a time when a formula made people smile because it seemed so caricatural: “Americans invent, the Chinese copy, Europeans regulate.” Forty years have passed, and the smile has frozen. The United States holds the AI locomotive, China loads the wagons with advanced production, and Europe, suitcase in hand, remains on the platform discussing whether ChatGPT should say “hello” in gender-neutral language.

This is no longer a caricature but an observation. While others build the rails, buy the energy, and organize the flows, we perfect the station’s internal regulations. Seen from afar, this is reassuring; seen up close, it isolates. Europe relies on compliance as if it served as strategy. The world, meanwhile, advances through rapid iterations, risk-taking, and industrial deployment. Between the two, the gap widens, quietly, almost politely.

Yet, everything is still possible. The suitcase isn’t closed and the train isn’t out of sight. All it would take is a common project, a shared will, for Europe to stop waiting on the platform and finally decide to chart its own course.

America inventing, an overwhelming dominance in AI

American dominance in artificial intelligence is no longer an impression, but a measurable reality. The United States has built an ecosystem where capital, research, and political ambition converge to dig a chasm that has become abyssal with the rest of the world.

In 2024, out of $252.3 billion invested in AI globally, the United States captured $109.1 billion [1]. This isn’t a lead, it’s a gulf. China, despite being presented as Washington’s technological rival, only attracted $9.3 billion, twelve times less. The United Kingdom, Europe’s proud flagship, $4.5 billion, twenty-four times less [1].

Source: Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2025 [1]

These figures don’t describe a competition but a hegemony. And most worryingly, the gap is widening. In the field of generative AI, the investment difference between the United States and the China-EU-UK bloc reached $25.4 billion in 2024 compared to $21.8 billion the previous year [1]. This is no longer a race, it’s a monopoly in formation.

This superpower rests on an assumed strategy, direct, almost brutal. In July 2025, the Trump administration signed three executive orders explicitly aimed at ensuring the “global dominance” of the United States in AI [2]. The White House action plan says it bluntly: “the United States is engaged in a race to dominate AI globally” [2].

The result: an unrestricted playground for Silicon Valley giants. Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI don’t just prosper there, they crush the competition. Behind them, a myriad of young shoots with dizzying valuations. In 2024, the United States had 274 tech unicorns, 5.5 times more than all of Europe combined [10].

While Europe is still looking for its champions, America produces them on an assembly line. It doesn’t experiment, it industrializes. And in this success mechanism, every dollar invested becomes a lever of global influence.

China, from copier to technological leader

While America invents concepts, China has accomplished a silent metamorphosis. It’s no longer the cheap workshop where the West outsources its production; it has become the master of value chains, the one who controls the vital arteries of tomorrow’s economy. The adage of “copying” now belongs to the past, swept away by a vertical integration strategy supported by a state that never bets halfway.

This dominance can be read in three key sectors: industrial robotics, semiconductors, and green technologies. Three pillars on which tomorrow’s economy rests.

The figures from the Stanford report are eloquent. In 2023, China installed 276,300 industrial robots, more than the rest of the world combined [1]. That’s 7.3 times more than in the United States. In ten years, its share of global installations has gone from 20.8% to 51.1% [1]. This isn’t progress, it’s a takeover. While the West automates drop by drop, China transforms its productive apparatus at forced march. The factory of the future won’t be German or American, it’s already Chinese.

Aware of its vulnerability to American sanctions, Beijing has launched an unprecedented offensive to master the semiconductor value chain, those tiny chips that are the brain of all modern technology. “National teams” led by giants like Huawei orchestrate this rise to power [4].

Huawei is becoming the leader of a national team in the semiconductor field. It dominates the supply chain, particularly in chip manufacturing. (MERICS, Huawei is quietly dominating China’s semiconductor supply chain, April 9, 2024 [4])

The strong symbol came in September 2023 with Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro smartphone, equipped with an advanced chip that American restrictions aimed to prohibit. A technological thumbing of the nose, a signal: “we no longer depend on you.” This strategy is financed by massive state funds like the “Big Fund,” already in its third investment phase.

But it’s in green technologies that Chinese dominance becomes tangible for the Western consumer. In 2024, BYD captured 18% of the global electric vehicle market, surpassing Tesla [5]. In its domestic market, its share climbs to 29% between January and September 2025 [6]. This lead rests on an almost total mastery of the battery value chain. Chinese companies, led by CATL and BYD, control 75% of global production [7]. The Economist estimates that China manufactures 85% of global batteries and that it has secured its supply of raw materials, particularly in Africa where its companies will control more than 90% of lithium extraction for the coming decade [8, 9].

While the West debates the energy transition, China is building it and controlling its infrastructure.

Europe regulating like a disarmed police officer

Faced with the frantic race led by the United States and Chinese industrial power, Europe has chosen a third way. Not that of massive investment nor that of offensive strategy. Europe has chosen regulation.

With the AI Act, adopted in June 2024, it becomes the first in the world to propose a complete framework for artificial intelligence, based on a risk-based approach [12]. The intention is laudable: to create “trustworthy” AI, “human-centered.” But this posture of “digital police officer” reveals structural weaknesses and an investment lag that threatens to marginalize the continent.

The problem isn’t regulation itself, but its timing and execution. The AI Act comes into force while the Code of Practice on General Purpose AI Models, supposed to complement it, remains unfinished. It’s like building a highway before defining the signage.

This situation provoked an unprecedented outcry. In July 2025, more than thirty entrepreneurs and investors, including the founders of Synthesia, Voi, Deel, and investor Harry Stebbings, signed an open letter asking member states to suspend the deployment of the legislation [22]. Their argument is simple: applying a law whose rules aren’t finalized would create regulatory fragmentation within the single market itself. Each state would interpret the gray areas in its own way, transforming the continent into a patchwork of constraints. Startups, without lawyers or margins comparable to American giants, would be trapped in an administrative labyrinth.

The European Commission itself acknowledged the problem in April 2025, admitting that there was “an opportunity to minimize the potential compliance burden of the AI Act, particularly for small innovators” [23]. In other words, we may have gone too far, too fast.

The contrast with American and Chinese approaches is striking. The United States favors flexibility, China controls politically but economically supports its champions. Europe, meanwhile, locks itself between caution and powerlessness: too regulated to seduce investors, not powerful enough to impose its standards on the rest of the world.

The investment chasm

Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, summarized the situation in his report on European competitiveness, presented in September 2024:

EU companies spent about 270 billion euros less on R&D than their American counterparts in 2021, largely because we have a static industrial structure dominated by the same companies and technologies as decades ago. Mario Draghi, Speech to the European Parliament, September 17, 2024 [13]

270 billion euros of annual R&D lag. This isn’t a gap, it’s an abyss. Europe imports more than 80% of its digital technology, and only four of the fifty largest global technology companies are European [13].

In 2023, the United States had about 1,500 unicorns, Europe between 100 and 200 [11]. This is no longer a competition, it’s an absence.

Beyond the figures, the continent’s structural dependence is worsening. American giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control 72% of the European cloud market, while local providers cap at 15% [24]. The Gaia-X project, supposed to embody digital sovereignty, has produced no credible equivalent. It symbolizes Europe: many announcements, few results.

In semiconductors, dependence on Taiwan remains massive, with TSMC controlling 92% of global production in certain segments [25]. The European Chips Act does attract TSMC to Dresden, but shifts the problem without solving it: the supplier remains foreign. Meanwhile, China invested $38 billion in 2024 in its own equipment [25].

Regulation, shield or burden?

The AI Act, the Commission’s pride, is perceived by many industrialists as a brake. A report by GIS Reports Online in October 2024 describes it as “premature regulation that will stifle the development of digital technology in Europe” [14].

The Carnegie Endowment warned in May 2025 that the EU risks being “deprived of both technological autonomy and regulatory influence” if it doesn’t couple its regulation with an ambitious industrial policy [15]. The real obstacles lie elsewhere: underfunding, fragmented markets, dependence on non-European infrastructure.

Europe excels in components but fails to build architectures. ASML dominates advanced lithography, SAP rules enterprise software, but no player federates a consumer ecosystem [28]. The continent makes the bricks, but not the buildings. Initiatives like EuroHPC and its “AI Factories,” or the InvestAI program, try to reduce the gap [29]. But faced with the $325 billion in investments planned by American giants in 2025 [27], these efforts seem derisory.

At a dinner at the Élysée in June 2025, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, summarized the situation with biting irony: “The problem in Europe and France is that you’re too slow. It’s like your wine, you wait for it to age, for it to be perfect” [30]. While Europe refines its regulations, the market advances without it.

While Brussels consults, Microsoft signs a 20-year agreement to reactivate the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its data centers [26]. In parallel, American and Chinese giants build the energy and industrial infrastructure of the future.

Europe, meanwhile, writes the traffic rules for vehicles it no longer manufactures.

France or the illusion of the Gaulish village!

In the midst of this gloomy European picture, France wants to believe it’s the exception. With a dynamic ecosystem, an ambitious “French Tech,” and some brilliant successes like Mistral AI, it imagines itself resisting decline. In 2025, Paris even dethroned London as Europe’s leading startup ecosystem [16]. The France 2030 plan, endowed with 54 billion euros, nourishes this ambition.

The success of Mistral AI, valued at 11.7 billion euros less than a year after its creation, has become the symbol of this renewed confidence [17]. With more than 1,000 startups in AI and the goal of 100 unicorns by 2030, compared to 30 today, optimism seems warranted [18, 19].

But behind this shiny facade lie deep fragilities. The country that wants to lead AI is also the one slowing its own race. As the French Tech Journal summarizes: “France is rushing to lead AI while standing on the brakes” [33].

The figures are unequivocal. In 2024, only 10% of French companies used AI, compared to 13% on average in the European Union, far behind Nordic countries at 20-28% [33]. And 73% of French people fear AI’s impact on society, a world record [33]. We celebrate champions but fear their tools. It’s like applauding a marathoner while tying their shoelaces.

This wariness extends to the regulatory sphere. While the government pushes for acceleration, the CNIL, Arcep, and the Senate multiply warnings. In June 2025, fifty major European players, including Airbus, BNP Paribas, Partech, and Pigment, requested a two-year pause in AI Act implementation. “Startups pivot all the time, European regulation must do the same,” recalled Reza Malekzadeh of Partech [33]. Brussels’ response was clear: “No stopping the clock, no pause.”

The silent hemorrhage

Behind the speeches, the flight of capital and talent accelerates. In 2024, 56% of French investments in venture capital went to startups based in the United States [34]. Hugging Face moved to New York, Pathway to Menlo Park, and Mistral AI opened an office in Palo Alto. As Matthieu Soulé of Cathay Innovation summarizes: “To be a global leader, you have to target the American market” [34].

The Gaulish village exports its best warriors before they’ve even fought on its soil.

Political instability

The country’s main fragility remains its chronic political instability since the 2024 legislative elections. In less than two years, France has seen five Prime Ministers parade through, toppled by motions of censure and negative votes, a record under the Fifth Republic [36, 37]. This crisis, described as the “worst in decades,” costs according to François Villeroy de Galhau “at least 0.2 percentage points of growth” [38], with some economists estimating the loss at 0.3 points [39].

In this uncertain climate, the technology ecosystem sounds the alarm. “There’s no longer a captain at the helm, no crew to steer the ship,” confided Homéric de Sarthe, CEO of Craft AI [20]. Investors become cautious, hiring freezes, innovation funds stagnate. For Maya Noël, director of France Digitale, “the business world needs stability and visibility to continue investing, recruiting, and innovating” [20].

Structural ailments

Beyond the political crisis, France suffers from lasting handicaps. The technological lag particularly affects SMEs and mid-caps, the heart of the economic fabric [21]. Administrative complexity and over-regulation hinder innovation. Cloud adoption remains low: 22.9% of French companies in 2023, compared to 38.9% in the European Union [35].

As Professor Chengyi Lin of INSEAD points out, “the European tech scene is no longer following the United States, it has fallen behind China and other economic blocs” [20]. France is no exception.

The “Gaulish village” still resists, but it’s surrounded. Mistral AI holds on, Paris attracts talent, but the best cross the Atlantic. The country trains some of the greatest minds in AI, Yann LeCun at Meta, François Chollet at Google, without reaping the fruits. The vineyard is French, but the wine is bottled elsewhere.

All is not lost… but history doesn’t forgive those who hesitate too long

Forty years later, the adage is no longer a joke exchanged over a drink. It’s the summary of a frozen world order. The United States hasn’t just invented, it has created a system that perpetuates its dominance over disruptive technologies. China, meanwhile, no longer copies; it innovates and controls strategic value chains with a determination that commands respect.

And Europe? It regulates, from a position of weakness, risking becoming a simple consumption market for technologies designed elsewhere. This risk has a name. In a parliamentary report from December 2024, Senator Corinne Narassiguin warned of the danger of becoming a “digital colony” [31].

A digital colony is a territory that consumes without producing, whose data transits through foreign infrastructure, whose companies become subcontractors of ecosystems designed elsewhere. The report emphasizes that “the European Union is currently focusing on AI regulation, but this remains insufficient in the face of the size and progress of American and Chinese powers” [31].

The signs of this decline are visible. Europe is absent from entire segments: GPUs, advanced semiconductors, large-scale generative AI models. It also suffers a brain drain: 9.3% of top researchers based in the United States have a European degree [32]. While brains leave, common projects like the Franco-German-Dutch AI project, envisioned since 2017, remain intentions [31].

The Old Continent is at a crossroads, facing a binary and urgent choice.

• Awakening would require unprecedented capital mobilization, real market unification, and risk-taking to support champions capable of competing. Regulation would need to be linked to industrial strategy, securing cloud, semiconductors, energy, and retaining talent. The tools exist, EuroHPC, InvestAI, the Chips Act, but their scale remains derisory compared to the $325 billion invested by American giants in 2025 [27].
• The museum, the opposite scenario, would see Europe continue its current trajectory: regulatory excellence but industrial marginalization. A continent debating AI ethics while others build nuclear plants to power it. A market of 450 million captive consumers, benefiting foreign companies, without local champions. A space where startups exile themselves before maturity.

Each year of delay widens the gap. Europe still has assets, talent, an immense market, and unique normative capacity, but the window of opportunity is closing.

The innovation train won’t wait. And history doesn’t forgive those who hesitate too long.

Yet nothing is set in stone. Europe has already proven it can transform constraint into strength. In the 1960s, faced with Boeing’s dominance, it created Airbus in 1970, which became the world’s leading manufacturer [40]. In the late 1970s, the French telephone network was in shambles: fewer than 7 million lines for 47 million inhabitants. In five years, under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France modernized its network, going from 18 months’ wait for a line to 15 days [41]. This transformation enabled the emergence of Minitel, an “Internet” before its time [42].

After the war, a ruined Europe experienced the Trente Glorieuses (Thirty Glorious Years) thanks to the Marshall Plan and common will. From this came CERN in 1954 [43] and Ariane in the 1970s [44], symbols of scientific and space independence. Even in digital, European champions exist: ARM, born in the United Kingdom, now equips more than 95% of global smartphones [45], SAP, founded in 1972, dominates enterprise software [46], and ASML, in the Netherlands, holds a monopoly on EUV lithography machines [47].

Awakening won’t come from a decree or directive, but from awareness: technological sovereignty isn’t just about capital, but about culture, education, and collective will.

Europe can become again a laboratory of ideas and progress, provided it connects rigor to momentum, caution to boldness, morality to creative power. Airbus, Ariane, CERN, ARM, ASML, Minitel: so many proofs that by uniting around a clear ambition, it doesn’t follow the innovation train, it builds it.

Decline isn’t inevitable; it’s only the consequence of our indecision. But if Europe finds the courage to act, if it learns to look at the world not as a train moving away but as a construction site in motion, then it might discover that the future has never stopped waiting for it.

References

For meticulous minds, lovers of numbers and sleepless nights verifying sources, here are the links that nourished this article. They remind us of one simple thing: information still exists, provided one takes the time to read it, compare it, and understand it. But in the near future, this simple gesture may become a luxury, because as texts generated entirely by AI multiply, the real risk is no longer disinformation, but the dilution of reality in an ocean of merely plausible content.

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[3] (Information non utilisée dans la version finale)

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[44] Agence spatiale européenne (ESA), “Part 6 – The Ariane ‘success’ story”, consulté le 20 octobre 2025. https://www.esa.int/About_Us/50_years_of_ESA/Part_6–The_Ariane_success_story

[45] The Guardian, “ARM: Britain’s most successful tech company you’ve never heard of”, 29 novembre 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/29/arm-cambridge-britain-tech-company-iphone

[46] Wikipedia, “SAP SE”, consulté le 20 octobre 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_SE [47] Medium, “ASML: the Dutch company driving the global semiconductor race”, consulté le 20 octobre 2025. https://medium.com/@hayatoutahar/asml-the-dutch-company-driving-the-global-semiconductor-race-5e1af1457911