Geopolitical power once flowed through armies and treaties, but today it courses through silicon wafers, server farms and algorithmic systems. These invisible digital infrastructures and architectures shape every aspect of modern life.

Whoever controls AI infrastructure — compute, models, data and cloud — will shape the economic and political order of the 21st century. The U.S. and China understand this and are mobilizing every instrument of statecraft to secure supremacy. Europe must understand it too.

In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself. Europe faces a choice: build sovereign technological capacity or accept digital colonization.