EU aims to make “AI first” a guiding principle 

• Bitkom on the European “Apply AI Strategy”

Berlin, 8 October 2025 – Today, the European Commission presented its “Apply AI Strategy”, which aims to reduce Europe’s dependence on AI technologies and to build up its own AI capabilities. It complements the “AI Continent Action Plan” from April. Susanne Dehmel, member of Bitkom’s Executive Board, comments as follows:

“With the Apply AI Strategy presented today, the EU is initiating an important shift in awareness when it comes to artificial intelligence. With the commitment to ‘AI first’, artificial intelligence is set to become an integral part of economic value creation, public administration and research in the future. This is an important step towards strengthening Europe’s competitiveness in the global AI race. The AI Gigafactories in particular, which are intended to serve as European high-performance computing centres, offer major opportunities for Germany and its research-intensive industry. The planned measures to strengthen computing infrastructure, data spaces, European Digital Innovation Hubs, the AI-on-Demand platform and the European Data Spaces form the backbone of a sovereign European AI economy and are brought together in this strategy.

However, programmes and strategies alone are not enough. In other countries, above all the USA and China, AI infrastructure projects are being planned on a far larger scale, amounting to €500 billion. Europe can therefore only achieve its ambitious goals if public investment is complemented by private capital – and to make this possible, we need innovation-friendly regulation and excellent location conditions, ranging from AI specialists to competitive electricity prices. Especially with regard to artificial intelligence, Europe should also be aware of a particular strength of its economy, which lies in its many innovative small and medium-sized enterprises, and which we must support in a targeted way when it comes to the use of AI. The Apply AI Strategy addresses this, but what will be decisive is to strategically bundle the numerous programmes and funding measures and implement them quickly and in a practical manner.”