Open Mic: Who Will Build Europe’s AI Infrastructure?
Sep 23, 2026 — 04:05 pm - 4:35 PMSalon Corinth
Speakers:
Open Mic: Who Will Build Europe’s AI Infrastructure?
As Europe's digital backbone grows more critical, so does its exposure to disruption. This session explores how operators, regulators, and engineers are rethinking infrastructure design to withstand geopolitical, environmental, and technical shocks, without sacrificing the pace of innovation.
Can Europe Build the AI Infrastructure It Wants? - Open Mic Session
Europe wants resilient and sovereign AI infrastructure, but where does the demand come from?
Today, frontier models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are largely not served from European cloud infrastructure. For European cloud providers, this creates a classic chicken-and-egg problem: without significant AI workloads, there is little incentive to build the infrastructure; without the right infrastructure, there is little reason for AI workloads to move.
Open-weight models may offer a different path, but only if Europe actively creates the demand for them.
This Open Mic will explore what that means in practice. Does Europe need a deliberate industrial policy for AI infrastructure? Should public procurement play a stronger role in creating demand? And what does “sovereignty” actually require if we want European AI infrastructure to be viable, competitive and resilient?
Come with a view, a challenge or a provocation. This is an open conversation about what Europe needs to do — not simply what it hopes will happen.