The race for the domination of the AI infrastructure has left Europe with the United States down -but the continent still has a chance of global leadership in AI apps.
That was the judgment of the Dutch technology leaders at the meeting, the only inviting political trail of the TNW conference in Amsterdam.
While the Silicon Valley controls the scaffolding for AI, they asked Europe to concentrate on building apps on the top.
The call was headed by Jeroen van Glabbeek, CEO and founder of CM.com, a platform for customer loyalty with a market capitalization of around € 217 million and annual income of € 274 million in 2024.
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Van Glabbeek believes that the US advantage in the AI infrastructure could become a launch pad for European software. “The infrastructure is already there,” he said.
This infrastructure is built up with unprecedented investments. In 2025 alone, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft plan to spend over 300 billion USD (EUR 261 billion) for data centers, networking and cloud services for AI, according to CNBC.
Van Glabbeek called it “the biggest investment in technology in human history”.
European technology companies cannot correspond to these expenditure expenditure for hardware. But they can capitalize by building AI apps on the foundations laid in the USA.
Europe already has a strong recording of building top animal apps, Spotify and grammar via Revolut and Klarna. In the KI era, van Glabbeek is a new wave of them that appear from the region.
“We won't win the Hyperscaler -ai platform game, but there is still something positive to compete -and it is on the application page,” he said.
The feeling was repeated by other technical ladders on stage.
Sohrab Hosseini, co-founder of the generative Ki startups Orq.ai based in Amsterdam, emphasized the chances of the “orchestration and application levels”, while Lucien Burm, President of the Dutch startup association, pointed out where the profit lies.
“The money is likely to be earned in the application layer,” he said. “We won't win that much in very deep AI hardware technology.”
In order to meet European AI potential, the speakers demanded a trio of financial changes: a higher risk appetite of investors, less bureaucracy in terms of public funds and more local procurement. However, your most urgent demand is one that hits the continent of the technology sector: innovation -friendly regulation.
