At TechBBQ, Europe's AI Conversation Kept Circling Back to Who Controls the Stack

At TechBBQ in Copenhagen last week, more than 10,000 investors, founders and policymakers gathered under the banner "Emerging from Agency" to talk about artificial intelligence. But according to attendees, the conversation kept drifting away from what AI can do and toward a blunter question: who actually controls it. Not just which models Europe can build, but who owns the chips, the data centers, the networks and the foundation models that European companies now depend on to function.

The urgency wasn't abstract. Earlier this year, Anthropic made its Mythos and Fable models unavailable to users outside Europe, an incident that rattled software teams across the continent and forced founders to confront how much of their stack sits on infrastructure they don't control. "TechBBQ's theme of agency felt particularly timely this year as the conversation shifted from what AI can do to what we're actually willing to let it do," said Ellen de Brever, an angel investor and head of partnerships at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Cellerator, in an interview during the conference. "The age of AI agents isn't really a story about machines gaining agency," she added. "It's a story about humans deciding what to give up."

That framing extended well beyond models. On a panel about agentic labor, Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI and Intelligent Internet, put the stakes in stark geopolitical terms. "Sovereignty is the ability to resist power being exerted over you," he said, warning about the concentration of power in a handful of AI labs and predicting that "inevitably, every country will be run by AI" and that "the person that controls the AI controls the country." Signal president Meredith Whittaker, appearing on a separate panel on privacy and AI, argued the current era is building a "data collection apparatus" that labs obscure with marketing designed to make users forget "about the collateral consequences" of the data being harvested. Europe's anxiety, she said, is itself a market opportunity: "There is still a huge market need for privacy. And particularly with the sovereignty concerns, we will have customers here."

The dependencies being debated in Copenhagen are concrete and stacking up. On compute, the European Commission is running a call for up to seven AI "gigafactories," each envisioned with roughly 100,000 advanced processors — about four times the capacity of a typical current-generation data center — backed by an estimated €20 billion in public investment through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, with facilities targeted for operation by mid-2028. Consortia bidding for the projects must be European-led, an effort to keep the infrastructure a "sovereign asset" even though the GPUs inside it are still largely imported from Nvidia and other U.S. suppliers. On foundation models, Paris-based Mistral AI has raised €722 million in debt financing to build Nvidia-powered data centers across Europe — starting near Paris and going live by mid-2026 — while separately committing €1.2 billion to a Swedish facility expected to deliver 23 megawatts of AI compute in 2027. Mistral and a coalition of European enterprises are aiming for 200 megawatts of underwritten compute capacity by the end of 2027 and a full gigawatt by 2030.

The newest dependency to surface is network capacity. In the UK, VodafoneThree's networks director Andrea Donà told the Guardian that the country's mobile infrastructure isn't ready for the traffic AI will generate. "I am embarrassed today at the level of quality of our network," he said, comparing the strain of mass AI adoption to the stadium-level signal collapse that already happens at events like Wembley or Silverstone — except permanent. The obstacle isn't capital: VodafoneThree has committed £11 billion to upgrading masts even as it consolidates its network footprint by 30%. Rather, it's process — about 96% of planned upgrades are on existing structures, yet more than half of those still require planning permission, and UK mobile coverage already ranks worse than every EU member state and G7 country, 57th globally on Opensignal's data. Donà's fix is regulatory, not financial: "Planning reform is the lowest possible cost growth policy, it doesn't require any government money." The European Union has already moved on this front — its Gigabit Infrastructure Act, in force since November 2025, gives national authorities four months to decide a permit application before it is automatically deemed granted, a mechanism the UK has no equivalent of.

Why It Matters

Europe's sovereignty push is running on a real clock: the EU AI Act's next phase of enforcement, overseen by the European Commission's AI Office alongside national regulators, began August 2, 2026, layering compliance obligations onto companies at the same moment the bloc is trying to build out its own compute, model and network base. Advocates frame this as overdue self-determination — Mostaque's warning that whoever controls the AI controls the country is a distinctly political argument for keeping the stack in European hands, and Whittaker's read on privacy demand suggests a genuine commercial opening for sovereignty-branded alternatives to U.S. hyperscalers.

But the counterargument voiced by other founders at TechBBQ deserves equal weight: some attendees told TechCrunch reporters that the Mythos and Fable disruption barely affected their teams, and that dependence on U.S. and Chinese infrastructure, while risky, is "still pretty much OK" for now. Critics elsewhere warn that "sovereignty" can shade into protectionism — subsidizing gigafactories and domestic champions that duplicate, at enormous public cost, infrastructure the U.S. has already built cheaper and faster, rather than letting Europe specialize in the layers where it has genuine advantages, such as regulated-industry applications, privacy-by-design tooling, or scientific and health AI. Whether €20 billion in gigafactory funding produces genuinely competitive compute or simply expensive redundancy is an open, contested question, not a settled one.

What to Watch

Watch three concrete tests over the next 18 months: whether the EU's gigafactory tenders actually reach operational capacity by their mid-2028 target, whether the UK adopts planning reform resembling the EU's Gigabit Infrastructure Act to unblock its mast upgrades, and whether Mistral and its compute-commitment coalition hit their 200-megawatt milestone by the end of 2027. Each will show whether European sovereignty is becoming durable infrastructure or remains, for now, mostly a conference conversation.