Vlad Shishkaryov, Bridge LT 🇺🇸🇬🇧

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar just diagnosed exactly why Europe is losing the AI race. The answer isn’t money. Sankar: “Europe is kind of the worst of both worlds. They neither spend a lot of money nor move quickly.” Not one failure. Both failures simultaneously. No spending and no speed. The two things that determine who wins the AI era. Europe is losing on both. Sankar: “You could spend half as much money and go 4 times faster, and you’d probably win.” The race isn’t about outspending America. It’s about outpacing it. A smaller budget with faster execution beats a massive budget moving slowly every time. Europe isn’t doing either. While the US deploys billion dollar compute clusters and China builds national AI infrastructure at state scale, Europe is debating compliance frameworks and optimizing for safety over velocity. Regulating the revolution while their competitors are building it. Sankar: “Clarity only seems to come when the barrel of the gun is in your face.” He points to Ukraine. Before the invasion, slow and bureaucratic. The moment the threat became existential, they became some of the fastest military innovators on earth. Urgency that peacetime never produces arrived overnight because it had to. Europe is watching that lesson from a comfortable distance and drawing the wrong conclusions. The gun in this race isn’t a military invasion. It’s AGI. It’s foundational infrastructure. It’s the moment when the models, the chips, and the data centers are owned by someone else and every European government and company runs on foreign intelligence they cannot control, cannot audit, and cannot replace. Ownership at the foundation level isn’t negotiable. Whoever controls the models controls everything built on them. Permanently. Europe debated. Competitors built. By the time that barrel is visible, the infrastructure will already be built. The winners of this decade won’t wait for the crisis to start moving. They already are.