Sovereignty without gunpowder?
My first memory of strategy computer games was at a friend's house, playing Civilization, circa 1998.
"I'm currently fighting a war with Greece."
"How is it going?"
"Well, I have gunpowder and they don't, so..."
In Civ, technology decides almost everything. A musketman beats a spearman nearly every time, no matter how many wonders stand behind the spearman.
Energy is the gunpowder of our Civilization. Europe seems to have forgotten that. If you want energy you have to build mines, wells, solar fields, battery factories, power plants, uranium enrichment plants. In short, energy is industrial policy.
This is addressed to the people in Berlin and Brussels who can change that. I want Europe to not die.
This is what losing looks like
AI runs on electricity, but so does the rest of our industrial civilization.
Over the next decade AI will become a core input to science, industry, and defense. Countries that own the compute will develop and run the models on their own terms. Everyone else will rent them, on terms set somewhere else, and pay for the privilege of ceding their national sovereignty to minds and ideas that reflect other cultures and different, often competing, interests.
Europe has lived through a version of this already. In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine and for all their stringent rhetoric, Europe continued to wire Russia $1b per day to avoid the icky inconvenience of developing fracking within its own borders. To this day, Russia can continue its lawless rampage on the frontiers of Europe and there's not a damn thing Brussels, or Berlin, can do about it.
In AI, the future, by which I mean 2027, will run on AI owned by private American labs, or 100% totally independent private Chinese communist labs that definitely don't have CCP commissars in their executive suite. The US does not typically invade its neighbors and it's possible China will leave Taiwan alone, but Europe's inability to participate in this latest, greatest, and perhaps final, industrial revolution, is mind boggling. I reserve the right to revise this paragraph if Mistral ships a frontier model.
The gap today is large. According to Bitkom, Germany, the largest data center market in Europe, has about 3.3 GW of IT load. The US had about 47 GW in 2025. Bitkom forecasts Europe as a whole at 37 GW in 2035 and the US at 160 GW. On that trajectory Europe ends the decade further behind than it started.
Berlin recognizes the importance of AI, it just can't do much about it
Berlin has set the right target. The national data center strategy adopted in March aims to double compute capacity by 2030 and at least quadruple AI compute, and to host at least one EU AI gigafactory, whatever that means.
In physical terms that means about 3 GW of new IT load, or roughly 21 TWh a year. AI capacity, about 15% of the German total in 2025, goes from about 0.45 GW to 1.8 GW.
That's about 4% of German electricity demand. Texas adds more generation than that in most years. A country with Germany's engineering base can do this, if it decides to act.
The people who are meant to solve this problem are its primary cause and sustainance
The other bills passed or proposed this year push the opposite way.
The EEG 2027 rewrite and the Netzpaket tie new wind and solar to the pace of grid expansion and shift curtailment costs onto generators. The nuclear shutdown has been declared irreversible, even as dozens of US startups are designing and commissioning new reactors and Brazil is developing nuclear submarines. New firm capacity means gas plants burning gas imported as LNG from the US, where consumers will have to bid against the superior buying power and superior strategic positions of both US domestic consumers and east Asian demand growth. In other words, not a great position to be in!
By Q3 2025 Germany's four transmission grid operators (50Hertz, Amprion, TenneT, TransnetBW) held 717 connection requests totaling about 270 GW, against a national peak load of around 80 GW. At the current rate of German natural gas power expansion, 270 GW will be built by the year 2475! This isn't some third world country at the back of the queue begging for turbine allocation. Germany co-invented the jet engine and has multiple domestic turbine factories!
On the demand side, the Energy Efficiency Act amendment moves the 100% renewable deadline for data centers from 2027 to 2030 and loosens the Power Usage Effectiveness limits. That helps operators on paper, but it adds no generation and no connections. It's still an unfunded mandate that adds additional marginal constraints to a power construction sector already paralyzed by regulatory inertia and capital scarcity.
Normatively, Germany is desperate for additional power supply, without which its industrial economy grinds to a halt, closing plants, shedding jobs, and undermining the fiscal core of the entire European bloc.
Descriptively, Germany is creating additional constraints on deployment, demanding additional concessions from a previously powerful industrial base that's already dead in the water, closing nuclear plants, banning innovation, paying hundreds of billions in tribute to Russia, and acting surprised that each winter doesn't quite manage to finish it off entirely.
Germany's power situation is dire and requires a serious response. This means aggressive supply side interventions to loosen, or ideally delete entirely, entire tranches of regulatory clutter that prevent construction. Germany's solar construction effort is eclipsed by Pakistan, a country with GDP per capita 36x lower.
What I'm asking for
Let large loads bring their own power. A data center that builds its own solar, storage, or gas behind the meter shouldn't wait years for a permit or pay grid fees on electrons that never touch the grid. When I drafted this, Claude suggested we give Berlin a 12 month permitting deadline. Time kills deals. This is a decision that could be made over a cup of coffee. In terms of Germany's challenges, the decision has already been made. xAI, in its first time datacenter construction effort, stood up Colossus I in a few months, and Germany's acquisition process alone will take longer than that. We're all desperate to see some sign of life from the coma-stricken patient. If Germany doesn't get its act together in the next few weeks, why maintain hope?
Connect now, firm up later. Offer flexible connections that can be curtailed when the network is stressed, instead of making projects wait for guaranteed firm capacity. A training cluster can drop load on short notice. Very few other industrial customers can. Texas has been doing this for years. It's not rocket science.
Site by power. The EU gigafactory call already treats a high voltage connection as a gating criterion. Meanwhile US hyperscalers are building power plants in parking lots and generating value. Rank bids on gigawatts and time to power, not national quotas. Iberia has about twice Germany's solar resource and plenty of land, and the Nordics have hydro. European sovereignty doesn't require the GPUs to be in Hesse. At this point, just landing them anywhere in the bloc and turning them on would be a win.
Allow same-day permits for solar installation on agricultural land. Solar is an agricultural-style land use. Crops and solar are both inanimate quiet sun-absorbing entities. Provide 20 year waivers on food production or grazing, centralize a fund for removal of solar plants after 20 years if the waiver is not extended, and deploy. Spain is in a forever-drought, so exclusive agricultural zoning just takes its single greatest economic virtue (large tracts of cheap, dry, sunny, undeveloped, unpopulated land) and permanently quarantines it from providing economic salvation to the country and the bloc. Singapore is short of land, southern Europe is not!
Electricity is not a vice. Taxes, levies, and network charges are a large part of the German industrial price. Subsidizing that price back down for a few sectors treats the symptom. Cut the charges for everyone. Cheap electricity is the lifeblood of the economy. If we're going to mandate something, mandate over-production.
Keep every working firm megawatt. Don't close a functioning reactor anywhere in the EU. Europe has closed 18, UK 7, and Spain is still planning to close another 7! Why do I have to spell this out?
Don't mistake efficiency rules for a supply plan. Relaxing Power Usage Effectiveness limits is cargo culting. It feels like work, it feels directionally correct, but it's a distraction from the correct move: Deleting this requirement and another 1000 pages of regulations that are strangling the cradle of Western Civilization to death. Re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is not a substitute for building.
Get moving, now!
Europe has everything else it needs. It has world-class engineers, ASML, regulated capital markets, sun in the south, wind in the north, and competent power grid operators. What's missing is a permission slip.
The timing is tight. Gigafactory applications close on 12 November, with selection in early 2027 and first facilities due in 2028. Frankly, this is nowhere near fast enough. By 2028, SpaceX will have put more compute into space. It's not that hard to build it right next to the autobahn.
If Europe doesn't build this capacity, it will still get built, in Texas, Virginia, and the Gulf. Europe will rent it, the way it bought Russian gas, and permanently cede what remains of its sovereignty to the US and/or China.
Berlin has to simply decide that Europe will not die on its watch.
Market Design
