The Humiliating Lie Behind Europe’s Technological Decline: That It Lacks Talent

Every few months, Brussel produces another report explaining why Europe is falling behind in artificial intelligence, and every few months it reaches for the same comforting vocabulary: not enough talent, not enough graduates, not enough "ecosystem.". It is an elegant alibi because it avoids the humiliating truth. As a recent Bruegel analysis makes clear, Europe’s problem is not a shortage of brains or ideas. It is a shortage of compute and capital — the two things the continent has been unwilling to finance at the scale required.

Consider Mistral, the company Europe presents as proof that it still belongs in the AI race. Its flagship models were trained on Microsoft Azure. It opened an office in Palo Alto to attract Silicon Valley engineers and venture capital. Its attempt to build European sovereign compute has secured roughly €830 million for infrastructure and GPUs, barely a down payment in an industry now being shaped investment measured in hundreds, of billions. Europe’s AI champion still depends on American cloud power and still has to go to California to find the scale.  https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-needs-strategy-close-artificial-intelligence-compute-gap

The broader record is more brutal. Mario Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report noted that no EU company founded from scratch in the previous fifty years had reached a market capitalisation above €100 billion. Half a century without producing a new corporate giant of that scale. And the failure is no longer confined to start-ups or frontier models. In a previous post, I examined the disturbing weakness of Germany in AI publication intensity: Europe’s industrial powerhouse, the country wrapped in the mythology of engineering supremacy, was already being outperformed by Portugal and several much smaller economies. The industrial verdict is now even more humiliating. In 2025, the United States produced roughly forty large foundation models, China about fifteen, and the entire European Union around three. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/what-drives-the-divide-in-transatlantic-ai-strategy/

Then comes the figure that should bury the talent fairy tale: around 12% of EU artificial-intelligence PhDs relocate to the United States within five years. Europe trains the researchers, congratulates itself on the excellence of its universities, denies them the compute, capital and industrial scale needed to compete — and then watches them leave for the very ecosystem Europe claims it wants to rival. This is not simply a continent losing an AI race. It is a continent refusing to enter it on serious terms. Europe did not run out of talent. It starved talent of scale and exported it to its competitors. 

PS — In August 2024, I noted that the companies producing the most highly cited AI research and patents were concentrated in the United States and China, with Europe already humiliatingly absent. What then looked like a warning now reads as a continental autopsy report. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-list-of-companies-that-are.html

A Full Professor Reveals the Simple Recipe for Earning €20 Billion in European Profits

A Portuguese full professor has handed his latest Expresso column—in Portugal's leading weekly—to Sir Chris Hohn, the British billionaire one of the world’s most successful investors and a revealing symbol of today’s monopoly-driven capitalism. The title alone draws blood: "One of the world's biggest investors only invests in companies that abuse their market power." The question underneath it is just as pointed: how has Hohn, backed by a team you could fit around a dinner table—barely half a dozen analysts—wrung extraordinary returns out of roughly USD 77 billion parked in just 15 ferociously concentrated bets? https://expresso.pt/opiniao/2026-05-28-o-poder-de-mercado-exposto-no-aeroporto-de-lisboa-a2723d55

The answer is as simple as it is damning. Hohn's genius isn't spotting well-run companies. Anyone can do that. His genius is spotting companies that never have to be especially well-run, because they're insulated from real competition by infrastructure they control, regulation that shields them, market concentration that strangles rivals, and barriers to entry so high that the textbook version of capitalism—the one with competitors, price discipline, and consumer choice—simply doesn't apply. He doesn't beat the market. He buys the parts of the economy where the market has been switched off.

For Portuguese readers, the irony is brutal. One of the crown jewels of Hohn's universe is the French multinational VINCI. For Portuguese readers, the irony is not merely brutal; it is obscene. At the height of the Troika intervention, when a financially strangled Portugal was compelled, under financial coercion, to privatise strategic public assets to satisfy the conditions of its bailout, VINCI acquired ANA — Aeroportos de Portugal, a 50-year concession over the country’s ten airports for just €3.08 billion. By 2024 that single concession had already thrown off some €2.3 billion in profit. By estimates aired in the Portuguese debate, it could ultimately yield more than €20 billion across the life of the contract. Put plainly: the buyer may recover the entire purchase price several times over.

This is where the fairy tale of free-market capitalism dies. Hohn’s success is not the heroic victory of a brilliant investor defeating competitors in open markets. It is the much darker art of spotting where governments have removed competition, locked the public into dependence, and converted essential infrastructure into private tribute machines. He is not beating the market. He is cashing in on markets that were already strangled before the game began.

So Portugal's airports are not merely a lucrative line on VINCI's balance sheet. They are a near-perfect monument to capitalism gone feral: strategic national infrastructure sold off too cheaply, converted into a private cash machine, and left to enrich distant shareholders for half a century while the citizens who funded it pay the monopoly premium for the privilege of using what was once theirs. Which leaves one uncomfortable question, and it deserves a blunt answer: how many public assets do we have to surrender before we stop dignifying this as capitalism and start calling it what it is—organised plunder, conducted in daylight? 

Update after 1 day - Blogger analytics indicate that the majority of views for this post come from the USA (24%), Germany (22%), and Finland (7%). 

A extraordinária falta de vergonha de uma conhecida universidade pública

 

"Todo este processo envergonha a UP e a sua comunidade, e devia provocar um profundo repúdio de todos os professores, de toda a academia. Haja vergonha!"

A frase que inicia este post encerra hoje um artigo de opinião publicado no jornal Público, no qual um professor da própria Universidade do Porto critica duramente a reitoria da sua instituição. Em causa está o facto daquela Universidade ter voltado a recorrer de uma decisão judicial que condenou o catedrático director da Faculdade de Medicina e a própria reitoria ao pagamento de uma indemnização de 30.000 euros a uma antiga docente, vítima de assédio, na sequência de "comportamentos humilhantes e discriminatórios" https://www.publico.pt/2026/05/29/opiniao/opiniao/reitoria-up-conivente-assedio-moral-mensagem-transmite-vitimas-2176000

Há instituições que se medem pelos seus discursos. Outras, pelos seus actos. A Universidade do Porto, infelizmente, parece ter-se especializado em ostentar os primeiros quando afirma que se compromete com “os mais altos padrões de transparência, integridade e responsabilidade” enquanto foge aos segundos. E a pergunta impõe-se: ao insistir em recorrer, depois de duas decisões judiciais no mesmo sentido, não se torna a Universidade do Porto, uma instituição que, ironicamente, deveria acima de tudo zelar pelo interesse público, conivente com o próprio crime de assédio que foi condenada por não ter travado?

Mas muito pior é a postura interna. Como se lê no artigo, perante uma sentença que dá como ilegais as práticas dos assediadores, a reitoria não abriu um único processo de averiguações nem instaurou qualquer inquérito disciplinar. Nada. Os condenados em primeira instância continuam a exercer funções como se nada fosse, enquanto a vítima ficou pelo caminho, sem doutoramento, sem carreira e desempregada, como se fosse lixo.

É precisamente aqui que o contraste se torna chocante. Compare-se esta omissão com a forma expedita com que, numa conhecida universidade holandesa, as queixas de vários alunos de doutoramento bastaram para que se constituísse uma comissão independente encarregada de investigar inadmissíveis desmandos de catedráticos, caso esse que divulguei no post "Um par de catedráticos canalhas". Lá, as denúncias internas foram suficientes para mobilizar a instituição. Aqui, uma condenação confirmada por duas instâncias não é sequer suficiente para iniciar um simples processo de averiguações. A diferença não é de meios: é de vontade. E enquanto a Universidade do Porto preferir gastar tempo e dinheiro a combater judicialmente quem foi reconhecidamente vítima, em vez de reparar o dano sofrido e responsabilizar quem o causou, a mensagem enviada a toda a academia é só uma: denunciar não compensa e quem assedia, principalmente se for catedrático, pode continuar a dormir descansado, sem receio de consequência alguma. 

PS - Uma última palavra para louvar o Professor Associado com Agregação Pedro Oliveira, autor do artigo supracitado. Ao denunciar publicamente a actuação vergonhosa da sua própria universidade, demonstrou a coragem que falta a demasiados membros da academia: a coragem de não se refugiar no silêncio conveniente, de não sacrificar a decência às suas ambições pessoais e de não abandonar uma vítima para proteger o prestígio da instituição e o poder dos seus catedráticos. Numa universidade digna desse nome, a lealdade não se demonstra encobrindo a vergonha; demonstra-se combatendo-a. Na academia só merece verdadeiro respeito quem esteja disposto a arriscar a comodidade, a posição e o isolamento para defender aquilo que é verdadeiramente justo. Como escrevi há seis anos, aqueles que beneficiam do chamado “estatuto reforçado de estabilidade no emprego” (tenure) deveriam ser obrigados a demonstrar que, em algum momento da sua vida académica, tiveram a coragem de dizer ou investigar algo verdadeiramente incómodo que justificasse esse estatuto. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2020/07/prostituicao-universitaria.html