Source: Financial Times (paywall)
American companies are committing vastly more capital to physical infrastructure—data centers, manufacturing facilities, chip plants—than European counterparts. Oxford Economics attributes this directly to competition for AI dominance. The spending gap reflects a structural competitive advantage: the US is building out the physical substrate required to train and deploy AI systems at scale, while Europe remains slower to mobilize comparable resources. Whoever owns the compute infrastructure captures the economic returns from AI deployment.