Insights

Dominik Mohilo is editor and IT expert at the Munich-based communications consultancy PR-COM, which mainly supports tech companies. (Source: PR-COM)
24. Jan 2025

TRUMP FORCES THE EU TO PLAY A GAME IT DOESN’T WANT TO PLAY

Author: Dominik Mohilo, editor and IT expert at the Munich PR and communications agency PR-COM, which specialises in high-tech

An investment of 100 billion US dollars, 100,000 new jobs, colossal data centres, the re-industrialisation of the USA and, incidentally, the protection of national security: US President Donald Trump expects all of this from the Stargate AI project. But even if Elon Musk is already questioning the gigantomaniac plan of the new US president and his partners Larry Ellison (Oracle), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Masayoshi Son (Softbank) due to a lack of funding, Trump is giving the world an insight into where the journey in AI is heading: he is setting the pace. In view of this development, we Europeans must ask ourselves whether our enlightened and regulatory approach to the topic will not be our undoing at some point. Is it worth setting up legislative barriers to innovation on the scale of the EU AI Act just to end up as moral winners but economic and technological losers? Trump and co. are forcing the EU to do something that we don’t want at all, namely an unscrupulous ‘play dirty’ policy. China can certainly live with that. But in order not to miss the boat in the AI race, the EU will probably have no choice but to follow suit. How this ambivalence can be reconciled remains completely unclear. Even if individual AI players take the wheel and put the pedal to the metal, legislation will probably put the brakes on them.