Europe's AI Dolce Vita?

PARIS — In many respects, the European Union appears likely to become one of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution’s biggest losers, with China and the United States leaving its economies in the dust. Even if European energy policies were not already making a massive data-center buildout prohibitively expensive, its fragmented capital markets would make raising the necessary financing extraordinarily difficult. Europe’s high tax burden, in particular, makes it harder to cultivate and retain AI superstars, much less attract them from abroad. Meanwhile, its ever-expanding regulatory state discourages business formation and entrepreneurship. But even without the AI boom, Europe’s aging welfare states look increasingly unsustainable. Economic growth has been glacial—Germany, the continent’s largest economy, has effectively stalled—while rearmament is placing ever greater demands on public finances. Compounding these problems is a shortage of centrist political leaders capable of containing populist movements on both the left and the right, both of which would likely fav