It’s 2031 and the US and China are about to tear Europe into items.
The US ploughed huge sums into datacentres and the EU didn’t. China constructed robots and Europe didn’t. American corporations “restructured” their workflows round AI and fired individuals, whereas EU staff went on lengthy lunch breaks and handed over administrative duties to the AI mannequin Claude.
Now the chickens are coming residence to roost. Europe’s financial system is a shambles as a result of it doesn’t have its personal AI. Populism is surging, the euro is wobbling, cyber-attacks are shredding EU companies. Brexit appeared like a good suggestion. It seems like the top of the European Union.
That, at the very least, is the imaginative and prescient of a speculative thought experiment, referred to as Europe 2031, penned by Brussels-based thinktankers and revealed fortuitously sooner or later earlier than the Trump administration determined to dam “international nationals” from utilizing a much-hyped AI mannequin constructed by Anthropic, referred to as Fable.
Within the heady week of G7 talks that adopted, the situation has gone viral – feeding a feverish dialogue of the urgency for EU tech sovereignty. It has been learn by members of the European parliament and, say its authors, was introduced up in monitor 1.5 discussions between British and German officers earlier this week.
Its authors say they really feel “vindicated”, by the eye it has acquired and by the truth that one among their predictions – that the US would limit world entry to superior AI fashions – seems to have briefly come true. They hope the situation will spur Europe in direction of a dramatic course-correction on AI.
The piece is a part of a burgeoning style of fictional AI doomsday situations, created by obscure figures, which have gained shocking traction amongst policymakers over the previous 12 months. In 2025 there was AI 2027, a thought experiment which culminates in a superintelligent AI killing all of humanity to make means for extra datacentres; in February, one other speculative situation imagined AI upending the US financial system. (The primary was learn by US vice-president JD Vance, the second contributed to a inventory market wobble.)
One complication of all this may be that their thought experiment is at occasions primarily based on present developments in AI whose end result is unsure or unsure.
Maximilian Negele contributed to Europe 2031, he says, due to the “unimaginable translation barrier” between Brussels and San Francisco, the place AI is being developed. Previously at US thinktank Rand, he left his job this 12 months to concentrate on the venture.
“As anyone who travels to San Francisco fairly a bit and talks to individuals there, what is occurring in Europe simply appeared like a slow-moving automotive crash to me,” he says.
The situation unfolds from the angle of a fictional bright-eyed Brussels staffer, Caroline Dubois, who has a German buddy, Christian Vogt, with a startup in San Francisco. On a go to, she’s impressed by America’s “70 or 80-hour” working weeks and discomfited by the conviction amongst tech bros that every part is about to vary.
Again in Europe, she works to evangelise her well-meaning bosses concerning the impending AI future – however fails to persuade. There’s an excessive amount of scepticism, and most of the people assume AI is a bubble.
Issues go from there. The People spend enormous sums on a large AI constructing programme – the situation highlights a real-life $100bn (£75bn) deal between OpenAI and Nvidia, the $300bn settlement between OpenAI and Oracle, and “bulldozers” breaking earth in Texas for an AI datacentre. Europeans, in the meantime, put ahead a tepid funding bundle and ignore advisers’ pleas for “a full regulatory carte blanche for datacentre suppliers”.
In a matter of years, America monopolises 70% of the world’s “compute” – the semiconductor chips that fill the datacentres that energy AI fashions. Europe’s financial system is in the meantime gasping for air, largely as a result of its corporations haven’t adopted AI.
As AI-powered cyber-attacks shred European corporations and unemployment surges, EU officers scramble to parlay their one final bargaining chip – the Dutch lithography agency ASML, which is significant to the manufacturing of AI semiconductors – into concessions from Beijing or Washington. However it’s too late. The US deploys highly effective “frontier AI” spy ware and learns the deepest fears of EU officers and likewise which ones are having affairs.
Curtains drop. Christian and Caroline exeunt stage left for a drink. Catastrophe impends.
Sceptical readers may level out that various the eye-popping sums and large initiatives that the authors name-check in describing the US’s AI ascent have already fallen aside.
The $100bn settlement between OpenAI and Nvidia, the most important AI deal of final 12 months, evaporated in February. The $300bn between OpenAI and Oracle appears uncertain, particularly as latest studies point out the maker of ChatGPT remains to be billions of {dollars} underwater because it burns cash on datacentre infrastructure.
The bulldozers on the bottom in Texas is probably not bulldozing very a lot any extra, as OpenAI pulled out of the flagship AI venture to which that second within the situation appears to refer.
The authors are sanguine about these issues. All through the piece, they pre-empt potential objections – comparable to AI being overhyped – by suggesting that the hapless European officers have these worries, too, and so they find yourself tragically improper.
“I wouldn’t rule out that there’s some exuberance and that one or two AI corporations may go bankrupt,” says Negele. “However what we wished to get throughout is a normal really feel for a model of what we predict will occur.”
He and his co-author, Alex Petropolous, agree that there could possibly be some bumps within the highway – together with mounting resistance to datacentres within the US. “I imply, individuals hate AI normally. Lots of people do. Folks hate datacentres. They destroy the panorama. They help massive tech. It’s a really, very unpopular coverage.”
The authors of Europe 2031 assume that the answer to that is datacentres. Europe must construct extra, quicker, ideally in AI zones the place issues comparable to energy and planning may be streamlined and deregulated.
“I believe our view is that the overall datacentre provide is sort of an inelastic provide. So there’ll solely be a restricted variety of datacentres constructed on the earth constructed yearly, and the query is, what number of of these would you like constructed within the US? What number of of these would you like in-built Europe?” says Petropolous.
It’s additional value noting that the primary organisation behind the Europe 2031 situation, Arq Basis, primarily based in Brussels, describes itself as “neither an advocacy NGO nor a venture-backed startup” and doesn’t disclose who funds it.
Brussels politicians who learn it, although, might take away an easier message: the situation has crystallised a dialog concerning the want for Europe to have technological sovereignty.
“This situation, Europe 2031, I consider that a few of the components they talked about can occur,” says Nicolás Casares, a member of the European parliament from Spain. “However I believe they’re growing – a bit – the alarms to be able to name our consideration.”
The US slicing off Europe’s entry to Fable, he says, implies that the EU must ask itself more durable questions on who’s constructing its AI infrastructure and who will profit from it.
“What’s the added worth of getting OpenAI or Anthropic datacentres in Europe?” he says.
“We’re shopping for a story that we want numerous datacentres to not lose the race for AI. However that is loopy … we’re paving the way in which for infrastructure that they’ll use and typically not enable us the potential for utilizing it.”
