Is Europe Losing The AI Race?

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Four Insiders On Why The Finish Line is Wrong

November 3, 2026

Aleksandar Scekic

Vincent Swan

Is Europe Losing The AI Race?

The usual story says the US has the money, China has the speed, and Europe has the paperwork. Our panel of four Europe-based leaders gave a more useful answer: there is a race, but nobody agrees where the finish line is.

This comes from our October 2026 Europe In The AI Race panel with four leaders from Centific, our partner. On the panel: Miloš Rajičić, General Manager for Europe; Sergio Jociles, Director of Delivery for LLM Data Services in Europe; Vincent Swan, VP of Strategy and Innovation and one of the founders of OneForma; and Uroš Pajić, Lead AI Engineer.

If you have read one "Europe is falling behind" story too many, this is the other side. Short version: Europe is behind on money and compute. Its edge is languages and industry, and that edge runs through people like you.

Three Regions, Three Different Races

Vincent opened with the comparison most people skip. The US has probably the most advanced models, and also the fewest guardrails and the least privacy around them. China is catching up despite sanctions, with a centralized approach where information is shared and progress moves fast toward a long-term position.

Europe is slower, and Vincent does not see that as strange. He pointed to the internet itself, where Europe led on security and privacy rather than on scale. In his view, diversity is Europe's strength: the habit of looking at its neighbors and asking what works for each of them.

Sergio added the point about sovereignty. Europe does not need to build everything itself, which would not be realistic. It needs alternatives and some control over the technology that matters most. For him, sovereignty is about having a choice.

The Honest Gaps

Nobody on the panel pretended Europe is ahead on resources. Uroš put numbers on it: by his count, four American companies spend around two billion dollars a day on infrastructure, while Europe's fund for large computing centers is about twenty billion euros. That is roughly ten days of their spending. Then he named the real problem.

"Talent is clearly not our problem. Our problem is what happens after research."

That gap is about turning research into companies. Vincent described the pattern bluntly: someone in Europe has a good idea, and someone from America arrives with the money to buy it. Uroš listed the rest: fragmented markets, too little growth capital, and slow commercialization. When asked whether Europe lacks compute or data more, he said computing power, where he put Europe about a decade behind. But he called the data gap the one Europe created itself, with some of the world's best health and public records kept apart in separate national systems.

Where Europe Has A Real Edge

Miloš did not try to compete on the biggest model. He pointed to industry. Europe's edge is AI that works on the factory floor in Stuttgart, Turin or Warsaw, used by a technician in their own language. After manufacturing, he named healthcare and financial services.

Uroš made the same point from the engineering side, and it may be the most useful line of the whole session.

"Building the largest model and building the best product are two completely different challenges. In production, nobody really cares how impressive your benchmark score is if your system is too expensive or fails."

Then there are the languages, and the case for multilingual systems built in Europe. The EU has 24 official languages and about 450 million people. Uroš called languages a cost if you treat them as translation, and an asset if you treat them as data nobody else has. Sergio added the dialects inside each language, and the difference between Spanish in Spain, Mexico and Argentina. His example: patients in Germany, Italy and Serbia describe the same pain in different ways, and a system that acts on it has to understand the difference. Getting that right needs native experts, early.

So, Is Europe Losing The AI Race?

On money and compute, yes, Europe is behind. But the panel did not see one race with one finish line. Each region is racing for something different: the US for returns on huge investment, China for long-term national position, and Europe to make the technology safe and useful for people.

Nobody has crossed a finish line yet. Vincent put it this way.

"There's definitely some sort of race, but there's no clear finish line, no clear target of what we're chasing, and not even a clear sense of what victory means."

Vincent went further. Maybe we are watching the wrong finish line. The bigger change may come when people use these tools every day, for example when agents start buying things on our behalf. He compared it to email, which began as a replacement for the fax and only changed everything once every person had an address. He also noted that he uses AI every day, and still does not reach for the top model for every task.

Quick Answers From The Panel

We closed with a fast round. These are opinions, given in a few seconds each, and they are worth reading that way.

Who leads in 2030? Vincent said China.

The most overrated word in Europe's strategy? Miloš said "sovereign", because lately it mostly means where servers are hosted. Vincent took the same answer.

The country that could surprise everyone by 2030? Miloš chose Poland, for its engineering and math talent and its large manufacturing base.

Is GDPR Europe's best export or its biggest headache? Sergio said both: it protects data, and it can slow companies down.

Open or closed models? Uroš said open, by necessity. Europe's path is to take strong open models and make them good in Slovak, Portuguese and Serbian.

What This Means For You

Look at where the panel located Europe's edge: industry, languages, cultures, and careful oversight. Every one of those depends on people who know a field, a language or a place from the inside. The EU AI Act already requires human oversight of high-risk systems, and that oversight needs people qualified to say an answer is wrong and explain why.

So whatever the scoreboard says in 2030, the part of this race that runs through Europe also runs through experts. If you know a language or an industry deeply, you are not watching this race from the side. Bring your expertise, find your project.

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