Vincent Luciani at the panel discussion hosted by Banque Wormser Frères: How to turn the tech revolution into sovereign, sustainable value

Scientific Acceleration and Colossal Investments: A Historic Turning Point

To understand AI today, one must first grasp the scale of the ongoing technological acceleration:

“It would already take us 100 years just to fully leverage the current state of scientific research in AI.”
Vincent Luciani, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Artefact

This already massive technological foundation is fueled by an investment race led by Big Tech. The global capital expenditure dedicated to data centers has reached $725 billion, and in 2026 alone, the combined AI spending of Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft will cross the $600 billion mark.

This concentration of capital is radically accelerating research. AI is no longer waiting for the science of tomorrow, it is producing it today. In mathematics, AI recently helped solve Erdős’ “distinct distances problem,” which posits that any set of points in a plane has a nearly linear number of distinct distances. In healthcare, this cognitive power translates into immediate gains: in Target Safety assessments (early evaluation of drug side effects), the time required to identify and evaluate therapeutic targets plummeted from two hours to just 10 minutes, supercharging researchers’ memory and productivity.

Computing Power: Addressing Europe’s Computational Gap

On the global stage, the dominance of the United States and China is overwhelming. Europe lags behind by a factor of 100 in computing power investments, with European players spending just $10 billion compared to $700 billion on the U.S. side.

This asymmetry is directly reflected in entrepreneurial and infrastructural momentum:

• Company Creation: The U.S. vastly dominates with 1,953 newly funded AI startups, far ahead of the UK (172), China (161), Germany (92), and France (84).
• Data Centers: The U.S. has over 5,500 active data centers, more than 10 times the volume of any other country in the world.

However, all is not lost for Europe, provided it shifts its sovereignty strategy toward pragmatic levers:

1. Priority on Adoption: Following China’s example, Europe must focus on the operational deployment of AI rather than draining resources into the race for fundamental research.
2. Mobilizing Savings: American savings stand at €100 trillion (including €40 trillion in pension funds that fuel tech), while the European Union has €36 trillion in savings, but only €6 trillion in tech-directed pension funds. Redirecting this capital toward innovation is an absolute urgency.
3. Infrastructure Sovereignty and European Preference: Europe must secure its own data centers (through initiatives like SoftBank, Choose France, or AION) and establish a framework similar to the U.S. Cloud and AI Development Act.
4. The European Ecosystem as an Accelerator: European companies must make concrete commitments through initiatives like “Je choisis la French Tech“. This means systematically shifting 10% of their critical IT budgets toward European or open-source AI solutions, while demanding data reversibility and portability to avoid vendor lock-in.

Redistribution of Value: Building “Moats” in the Age of AI

AI drives an accelerated dynamic of creative destruction, favoring the rise of smaller, more agile companies. In this rapid reconfiguration, economic value is distributed according to a “dumbbell logic”: value concentrates heavily upstream (infrastructure, standardizing large models) and downstream (specific business applications), leaving the middle of the value chain under immense pressure.

Faced with this risk, illustrated by the €1 trillion invested globally in data centers (roughly 1% of global GDP) without an obvious, immediate return on investment, companies must build durable barriers to entry (moats):

• The Convergence of Tech & Services: As the cost of pure technology plummets, the value of service and human integration rises.
• Strategic Insourcing: At Artefact, this pursuit of value translates to insourcing key functions (such as HR and talent management). True defensible moats now lie in workflow excellence, regulatory mastery, and leveraging proprietary data.
• European Strengths: Europe has major assets to leverage in robotics as well as vertical and applied AI. It must focus its investments on tomorrow’s battlegrounds, starting with AI applied to Defense, a crucial issue in today’s geopolitical climate on European soil.

The Societal Equation: Employment and the Green Transition

The transition to AI highlights critical ethical and responsibility questions, to which Vincent Luciani offered pragmatic, fact-based answers.

The Reality of Employment

Contrary to fears of massive job losses, current data shows the opposite impact: the companies integrating AI most aggressively are also the ones hiring the most. AI is not replacing humans; it is augmenting them, allowing employees to shift focus to higher-value-add tasks.

The Environmental Footprint: Europe’s Green Advantage

AI is often criticized for its energy consumption. However, Europe holds strong environmental advantages over the United States (which hosts 35% of the world’s data centers):

• Favorable Geography: Europe’s cooler climate naturally reduces the energy needed to cool infrastructure.
• Zero Water: In Europe, data centers do not use water for cooling, unlike standard practices in the U.S.
• Low-Carbon Energy: Europe relies on a largely decarbonized power mix to run its infrastructure.

Furthermore, AI is proving to be a powerful catalyst for the green transition when deployed in industrial sectors. Veolia’s example is particularly telling: by using AI to optimize the aeration systems used to purify wastewater, the group reduced its electricity consumption and CO2 emissions by 10%. By comparison, the direct electricity consumed by the AI for this project accounted for less than 1% of the gross energy savings generated. The net ecological impact of AI here is overwhelmingly positive.

Europe’s future in the AI era does not depend on its ability to copy American or Chinese giants in raw computing power. Europe’s sovereignty and economic success will depend on our ability to mobilize our capital, mandate European preference in our IT procurement, and deploy AI vertically and eco-efficiently at the core of our key industries.

AI investing for individual investors by Banque Wormser Frères – July 1st 2026 (video in French)