FII Priority Europe urges Europe to own the AI stack and rearm faster

The FII Institute's Priority Europe 2026 summit closed in Rome on Friday with a blunt verdict from its assembled heads of state, ministers, military commanders and technology founders: the continent has spent long enough producing frameworks and roadmaps, and must now convert commitments into deployed capital and operational capability.

The two-day gathering, convened under the FII Institute's Saudi-headquartered nonprofit umbrella, drew together streams that rarely share a stage: defence procurement reform, sovereign AI infrastructure, institutional quality as an investment variable, and European industrial competitiveness. The collision of those agendas in a single venue is itself a signal of how quickly strategic autonomy has become a cross-sector imperative rather than a policy-seminar abstraction.

The regulatory drag on deployment

Travis Kalanick, CEO of Atoms and founder of Uber, used a fireside session on autonomous systems to articulate a friction that runs well beyond his own industry. "When the regulatory process becomes the outcome, something that is genuinely good for people can roll out a decade late," he said. "That is how innovation gets delayed even when the benefits are already clear."

The observation carried weight because it applies symmetrically across verticals. European AI founders, autonomous-vehicle developers, biotech sponsors and fintech operators have all cited compliance timelines as a structural disadvantage relative to US and Chinese competitors. Kalanick's framing recast the debate: the cost of regulatory caution is not abstract risk avoidance, but measured in compounded years of ceded market share.

Sovereign AI: owning the full stack

Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere, offered perhaps the summit's sharpest definition of what AI sovereignty actually requires in practice. "Countries need capabilities that no one else can mess with, see the data inside of, or switch off at will," he said. "That is what true AI sovereignty means."

Gomez's argument extended the sovereignty conversation from model governance into physical infrastructure: chips, compute clusters, energy supply and data centres must be treated as critical national assets on a par with power grids and rail networks. With Europe generating around 18% of global GDP while capturing a disproportionately small share of global AI investment, the infrastructure deficit is both a competitiveness and a security question.

The defence build-out adds urgency. Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, Chair of the NATO Military Committee, addressed the EU's ReArm Europe plan, which is mobilising €800 billion through 2029, and rejected the premise that sovereignty and alliance are competing objectives. Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto added the industrial side of the equation: "The biggest enemy of every industry is time. European industry does not have many years to renovate itself, and the goal now, especially in defense, must be to speed up the journey from prototypization to production."

Capital, institutions and the convergence read-across

For macro investors, one of the more actionable threads came from a session on institutional quality and long-term capital. Spanish parliamentarian Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo drew on Daron Acemoglu's Nobel Prize work to argue that low taxes and good regulations are insufficient attractors without independent judicial enforcement: "You can have better regulation, but no independent enforcement. That's not good enough." The implication for sovereign wealth, pension capital and cross-sector private equity is that institutional credibility functions as a prerequisite for sustained inbound flows, not merely a governance nicety.

The convergence read-across is substantial. A European defence build-out at the €800 billion scale creates procurement pipelines that intersect with semiconductor supply, dual-use AI research, energy grid capacity for compute, and advanced manufacturing. Investors allocating across those verticals simultaneously face a single macro question: can European industrial policy compress the distance between strategy and production fast enough to compete? The Rome summit's closing prescription was precise on that point: fix energy markets at a European scale, reform competition policy to permit globally scaled companies to form, and redirect defence spending into dual-use research rather than administration.

Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi offered the sharpest summary of the stakes: "If we lose opportunities again, the future of Europe will look very similar to the future of museums."