Can Europe’s industrial legacy give it an AI advantage?

Europe lags behind the United States in the artificial intelligence (AI) race, with U.S. private investment in AI reaching $285.9 billion in 2025, compared to $20.9 billion invested in Europe. The U.S. boasts higher AI adoption rates, a larger number of data centers, and the world's most valuable AI companies. Currently, only ASML holds a trillion-dollar market cap in Europe.

Peter Koerte, CEO of Siemens's Smart Infrastructure division, highlights Europe's industrial data advantage, stating that the continent possesses the largest install base of Fortune 500 companies, many of which have been operating in Europe for decades. Siemens plans to invest over €1 billion in industrial AI over the next three years, aiming to shorten engineering cycles by up to 40%.

However, acquiring sufficient training data for industrial models poses a challenge, as securing data from leading manufacturers can be difficult. Siemens, founded in 1847, has a potential edge due to its decades-old relationships with most of the companies it works with, providing a level of trust necessary for data sharing. Despite facing competition from U.S. institutions, which employ 59% of the world's elite AI researchers, Siemens has successfully lured talent, including Amazon's vice president of generative AI, Vasi Philomin, and Amazon Web Services director Manu Parbhakar.

U.S. partnerships remain crucial for Siemens, as it collaborates with Nvidia to develop an industrial AI operating system. While the European Commission pushes for AI sovereignty, Koerte cautions that complete independence from American big tech is unattainable, emphasizing the need for borderless collaboration to fully harness AI's potential for efficiency gains.