The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, warned this Monday that Europe could finance part of the growth in artificial intelligence in the United States without benefiting to the same extent from that progress. During a speech in Vienna, Lagarde stated that European savers are once again financing the disruptive technology of our time, with most of the money continuing to flow to the United States.
According to the French central banker, euro zone households hold approximately 440 billion euros in shares of US tech giants such as Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta or Nvidia. The massive investments of these companies in artificial intelligence, financed in part through debt, are contributing to pushing long-term bond yields higher in the United States, and European interest rates evolve largely in line with US rates.
Lagarde emphasized that Europe will bear part of the cost of this boom through its own financing costs, but the question is whether it will also capture the resulting growth. The ECB President considered that the challenge is all the more important as artificial intelligence represents one of the main hopes for revitalizing European productivity at a time when demographic aging is reducing the available workforce and the continent faces great investment needs.
The official defended that Europe needs sufficiently advanced models that operate on European infrastructure and cannot limit itself to buying this technology from abroad. Lagarde cited the French startup Mistral, which just raised three billion euros to expand, but called for the development of more European artificial intelligence models, emphasizing that last year the United States produced 59 relevant AI models, compared to only one in France and the United Kingdom.
