If there’s anything buzzy in the tech world, chances are Xavier Niel has caught wind of it. The hacker-turned-entrepreneur owns a sprawling telecom empire, sits on TikTok parent ByteDance’s five-member board, and is a major startup champion, counting French darling Mistral AI among his investments.
The billionaire has had a keen eye on tech developments throughout his career. But he has also witnessed Europe slip behind the U.S. and China in innovation.
Europe has produced some promising startups amid the generative AI frenzy, such as Mistral AI and Aleph Alpha. However, the region will have to do a lot more to keep up with the global AI race.
Niel warns that Europe has a real shot at showing its promise and creativity on the AI front. But if it misses the boat, it could cease to be relevant.
“If Europe doesn’t do this right, it will become a very small continent abandoned for a few generations,” he told the Financial Times in an interview published in November.
What differentiates European AI startups are their “values,” such as privacy and transparency, Niel said. The continent is also generating engineering and mathematics-focused talent at its universities, which could give the region an edge—if it moves fast and breaks things, as the saying goes.
“Sure, the world moves faster now; the resources are greater. But there will always be two clever kids somewhere in the world, working out of a garage, with a technological vision or a new idea,” Niel said.
The French mogul, who is estimated to be worth $8.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is at the center of AI developments. His optimism in Europe’s AI prowess has led him to develop the world’s biggest startup incubator, Station F, in Paris. He has also coinvested $300 million in a nonprofit AI research lab alongside Eric Schmidt and Rodolphe Saadé.
Still, he worries that if Europe fails to ride the AI wave, it will be reduced to “the nicest place in the world for museums,” Niel told Wired in September. He likened the current AI moment to when search engines became mainstream. Today, they are largely run by American players, such as Google and Microsoft.
“If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win, because you were not there 25 years ago,” he said.
Other experts have also been concerned about Europe trailing behind and how that might impact the region’s security and defense prospects compared with the rest of the world.
What Niel touts as one of Europe’s strengths has also led to the perception that it regulates AI too harshly, pushing competitors out of its market. The European Union passed a first-of-its-kind draft of AI rules, which some see as groundbreaking and others too restrictive.
In an in-depth report on Europe’s competitiveness, former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi highlighted that AI could open up new opportunities if deployed correctly.
Meanwhile, German tech company SAP’s CEO, Christian Klein, said overregulation risks holding Europe’s startups back. The likes of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify’s Daniel Ek issued an open letter in September echoing similar concerns, urging Europe to fix its “fragmented and inconsistent” regulations on AI.
Companies on the Fortune 500 Europe list, which ranks the region’s biggest companies by revenue, are slowly but surely integrating AI into advanced applications. Ultimately, Europe’s strategy for addressing challenges could determine whether it’s a winner or a loser.
“Put simply, developing, launching, or just using technology is harder in Europe than it is anywhere else in the world. To stay in the global race, the EU needs a new approach: mitigating the risks of new technology while enabling innovation,” Google EMEA president Matt Brittin told Fortune in October.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Nov. 18, 2024.
