Category: 3. Business

Fewer than 14% of businesses in the EU use artificial intelligence (AI). The European Commission hopes to change that with its new Apply AI Strategy, which mobilizes €1 billion to encourage AI adoption across the bloc. Released in October, the plan aims to boost AI integration in strategic sectors, bolster competitiveness, and improve governance.

The strategy has three core sections. The first establishes sectoral “flagships”, a group of initiatives to expand AI use in the public sector and 10 private economic sectors: health care (including pharmaceuticals); robotics; manufacturing, engineering, and construction; defense, security, and space; mobility, transport, and automotive; electronic communications; energy; climate and environment; agri-food; and cultural and creative sectors and media. The Commission plans more than 50 sectoral actions under this framework, including launching an AI drug discovery challenge, funding the development and integration of AI-based cybersecurity tools, and deploying a European AI factory to train models for defense and space applications.

The second section addresses challenges to AI adoption at scale. The Commission sets four broad goals for this: greater AI adoption among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); an AI-ready workforce; sovereign frontier AI development; and innovation-friendly implementation of the AI Act. Another set of actions encompassing AI literacy training programs, a frontier AI initiative, and enhanced digital innovation hubs establishes concrete steps toward these goals. A third section on a “single governance mechanism” creates a forum for industry and civil society feedback on AI policies and an AI-monitoring authority to guide investment targets, policymaking, and public communications on AI developments.

The strategy fits into an extensive constellation of EU AI initiatives and legislation. It explicitly builds on the AI Continent Action Plan, and it complements two other new strategies: the AI in Science Strategy, which aims to support AI in scientific research, and the Data Union Strategy, designed to broaden the use and availability of data for AI. The Commission also calls on EU member states to align national AI plans with the strategy’s sectoral framework to create a common approach to AI adoption.

European technological sovereignty remains a key theme in the Apply AI Strategy as the continent strives to curb reliance on technology from countries outside the EU. The aim of the strategy’s “AI first policy” reflects the bloc’s goal to “integrate AI building on European solutions”. But the plan sets no specific requirements for the use of European sovereign technologies. US and multinational companies also have some opportunities to participate in the initiatives. They can join the industry feedback forum, for example, although broader transatlantic involvement remains unclear. Still, the speed and extent to which Europe can travel down the long, costly road to technological sovereignty remains an unknown.

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions. 

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As the first MoU of its kind ever signed between the Europeana Foundation and an EU Member State, the partnership aims to accelerate Italy’s participation in and contribution to the common European data space for cultural heritage, stewarded by Europeana. The partnership was formalised at the closing of the high-level conference “Connettere patrimoni, costruire futuri – Stati generali del Digitale nella Cultura”, held in Rome on 10–11 December 2025.

Among its key provisions, the MoU establishes a milestone commitment: the The Directorate-General for Digitisation and Communication of the Italian Ministry of Culture will provide 10 million aggregated data records to the data space by the end of 2026. The Europeana Foundation will offer technical advice, specialised expertise and capacity-building to support the contribution of these valuable resources. Achieving this target by 2026 would make Italy the largest national contributor to the data space, reinforcing its leadership role in Europe’s digital heritage landscape. The Italian Digital Library will play a central role in this endeavor.

A shared vision for the data space for cultural heritage

Inspired by the vision set out in the European Commission Recommendation of 2021 on a common European data space for cultural heritage, the MoU renews and strengthens the long-standing collaboration between the MiC and Europeana. At the heart of the MoU is a shared, ambitious vision: to enhance Italy’s contribution to the data space while maximising the benefits it gains from the broader data space ecosystem. Through this joint effort, Italy’s rich and diverse digital cultural heritage will be made more accessible, discoverable and reusable, reaching diverse audiences and sectors across Europe and around the world, and keeping it alive for generations to come. The partnership will also spur innovation, particularly in advanced technologies such as AI and 3D digitisation, enabling new ways to explore, reuse and experience cultural heritage.

A milestone commitment: 10 million records by 2026

A central pillar of the MoU is Italy’s commitment to contribute at least 10 million digital cultural heritage records to the data space by the end of 2026.

The Europeana Foundation will provide technical support to optimise aggregation and ensure interoperable data flows, paving the way for a robust, sustainable and scalable national aggregation system. This system will serve as a core component of the Italian Digital Library and will enable a seamless contribution of Italy’s cultural heritage to the data space. The Europeana Foundation will also provide specialised knowledge and operational expertise to the Digital Library, supporting its accreditation as an official partner of the common European data space for cultural heritage.

‘With this Memorandum of Understanding, we are taking a decisive step in building the digital infrastructure for Italy’s cultural heritage, in full alignment with the 2021 Recommendation on the common European data space for cultural heritage. Thanks to our collaboration with the Europeana Foundation, we will be able to strengthen the role of the Directorate-General for Digitisation and Communication and the Digital Library as the national hub for the aggregation, quality and interoperability of data, building on the work launched with CulturaItalia and taking it to an entirely new scale. Contributing at least ten million new records by 2026 is ambitious but within our reach, and will be accompanied by a structured programme of technical support, training and skills development for cultural institutions across the country. This investment in data, professionals and digital infrastructures will make our heritage more accessible, usable and reusable, serving the scientific community, education, tourism and new applications based on advanced technologies such as 3D and artificial intelligence. It is a challenge that we face with a strong sense of responsibility and with the awareness that the richness of Italy’s heritage can and must make a decisive contribution to building data space f and the digital future of culture’, said Andrea De Pasquale, Director General for Digitisation and Communication at the Italian Ministry of Culture.

‘We stand at a pivotal moment, driven by a new policy impetus in the EU’s digital agenda and the ambition to make Europe the continent of AI. Trustworthy, multilingual data powers Europe-based AI, and the common European data space for cultural heritage is set to provide it. Member States are essential: their data and commitment form the foundation of the data space, driving its potential for innovation. With this ambitious step, Italy makes its rich heritage widely accessible and reusable across sectors — from science and tourism to AI training. I hope it inspires other countries to harness Europe’s digital heritage as a resource for the future’ said Harry Verwayen, General Director of the Europeana Foundation.

‘Italy already stands proudly among the top ten EU Member States contributing to Europeana and the data space. Our network of cultural heritage institutions and professionals across Italy is thriving, and through this partnership, the Europeana Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Culture are joining forces to build Europe’s digital cultural future. By 2026, Italy will become the top contributor to Europeana and the data space — a milestone that makes me incredibly proud, and one that will concretely boost support to and engagement from cultural institutions across the country; from making technological innovations in 3D and AI more accessible, to sharing best practices and finding shared solutions’, said Martina Bagnoli, Chair of the Europeana Foundation Supervisory Board.

About the Ministry of Culture (MiC)

The Directorate-General for Digitisation and Communication of the Ministry of Culture coordinates the Ministry’s policies for digital transformation and institutional communication. Working in synergy with the other central offices and with state cultural institutions, it defines strategic guidelines, oversees information systems and the main online platforms, ensuring consistency, accessibility and quality of the services provided to citizens and professionals.

Through the National Plan for the Digitisation of Cultural Heritage and the measures of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), it promotes the creation and management of digital resources on cultural heritage, supports skills development, fosters the adoption of innovative technologies and ensures the security of infrastructures. In doing so, it helps to make collections, data and cultural content more easily accessible and reusable in the educational, scientific, professional and creative fields.

About the Europeana Foundation

The Europeana Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation that stewards the common European data space for cultural heritage in collaboration with a pan-European consortium, and contributes to other digital initiatives that put cultural heritage to good use in the world. It works to democratise access to culture digitally, empowering everyone to explore, learn from, and benefit from Europe’s rich heritage. Through projects, partnerships, and innovative services, models and frameworks, the Foundation drives the digital transformation and sustainability of the cultural heritage sector, making collections accessible, trustworthy, and reusable across society.

Media contacts

• At MiC: Arianna Nastasi, Secretariat and Director-General’s Staff, Directorate-General for Digitalisation and Communication, Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC) < [email protected]>

• At the Europeana Foundation: Lorena Aldana, Head of External Relations and Advocacy <[email protected]>

The amount of electricity data centers use in the U.S. in the coming years is expected to be significant. But regular reports of proposals for new ones and cancellations of planned ones mean that it’s difficult to know exactly how many data centers will actually be built and how much electricity might be required to run them.

As a researcher of energy policy who has studied the cost challenges associated with new utility infrastructure, I know that uncertainty comes with a cost. In the electricity sector, it is the challenge of state utility regulators to decide who pays what shares of the costs associated with generating and serving these types of operations, sometimes broadly called “large load centers.”

States are exploring different approaches, each with strengths, weaknesses and potential drawbacks.

A new type of customer?

For years, large electricity customers such as textile mills and refineries have used enough electricity to power a small city.

Moreover, their construction timelines were more aligned with the development time of new electricity infrastructure. If a company wanted to build a new textile mill and the utility needed to build a new gas-fired power plant to serve it, the construction on both could start around the same time. Both could be ready in two and a half to three years, and the textile mill could start paying for the costs necessary to serve it.

Modern data centers use a similar amount of electricity but can be built in nine to 12 months. To meet that projected demand, construction of a new gas-fired power plant, or a solar farm with battery storage, must begin a year – maybe two – before the data center breaks ground.

During the time spent building the electrical supply, computing technology advances, including both the capabilities and the efficiency of the kinds of calculations artificial intelligence systems require. Both factors affect how much electricity a data center will use once it is built.

Technological, logistical and planning changes mean there is a lot of uncertainty about how much electricity a data center will ultimately use. So it’s very hard for a utility company to know how much generating capacity to start building.

Handling the risks of development

This uncertainty costs money: A power plant could be built in advance, only to find out that some or all of its capacity isn’t needed. Or no power plant is built, and a data center pops up, competing for a limited supply of electricity.

Either way, someone needs to pay – for the excess capacity or for the increased price of what power is available. There are three possible groups that might pay: the utilities that provide electricity, the data center customers, and the rest of the customers on the system.

However, utility companies have largely ensured their risk is minimal. Under most state utility-regulation processes, state officials review spending proposals from utility companies to determine what expenses can be passed on to customers. That includes operating expenses such as salaries and fuel costs, as well as capital investments, such as new power plants and other equipment.

Regulators typically examine whether proposed expenses are useful for providing service to customers and reasonable for the utility to expect to incur. Utilities have been very careful to provide their regulators with evidence about the costs and effects of proposed data centers to justify passing the costs of proposed investments in new power plants along to whomever the customers happen to be.

Regulators, then, are left to equitably allocate the costs to the prospective data center customers and the rest of the ratepayers, including homes and businesses. In different states, this is playing out differently.

Kentucky’s approach to usefulness

Kentucky is attempting to address the demand uncertainty by conditionally approving two new natural gas-fired generators in the state. However, the utility companies – Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities – must demonstrate that those plants will actually be needed and used. But it’s not clear how they could do that, especially considering the time frames involved.

For instance, suppose the utility has a letter of agreement or even a contract with a new data center or other large customer. That might be sufficient proof for the regulator to approve charging customers for the costs of building a new power plant.

But it’s not clear what would happen if the data center ends up not being built, or needing much less power than expected. If the utility can’t get the money from the data center company – because they bill customers based on actual usage – that leaves regular consumers on the hook.

Ohio’s ‘demand ratchet’ and credit guarantee

In Ohio, the major power company AEP has a specific rate plan for data centers and other large electricity customers. One element, called a “demand ratchet,” is designed to mitigate month-to-month uncertainty in electricity consumption by data centers. The data center’s monthly bill is based on the current month’s demand or 85% of the highest monthly demand from the previous 11 months – whichever is higher.

The benefit is that it protects against a data center using huge amounts of electricity one month and very little the next, which would otherwise yield a much lower bill. The ratchet helps ensure that the data center is paying a significant share of the cost of providing enough electricity, even if it doesn’t use as much as was expected.

This ratchet effectively locks in the data center’s payments for 12 months, but regulators might expect a longer commitment from the center. For instance, Florida’s utilities regulator has approved an agreement that would require a data center company to pay for 70% of the agreed-upon demand in their entire electricity contract, even if the company didn’t use the power.

Another aspect of Ohio’s approach addresses the risk of changing business plans or technology. AEP requires a credit guarantee, like a deposit, letter of credit or parent company guarantee of payment, equal to 50% of the customer’s expected minimum bill under the contract. While this theoretically reduces the risk borne by other customers, it also raises concerns.

For example, a utility may not end up signing contracts directly with a large, well-known, wealthy technology company but with a subsidiary corporation with a more generic name – imagine something like “Westside Data Center LLC” – created solely to build and operate one data center. If the data center’s plans or technology changes, that subsidiary could declare bankruptcy, leaving the other customers with the remaining costs.

Harnessing strength in flexibility

A key advantage to these new types of customers is that they are extremely nimble in the way they use electricity.

If data centers can make money based on their flexibility, as they have in Texas, then a portion of those profits can be returned to the other customers that shared the investment risk. A similar mechanism is being implemented in Missouri: If the utility makes extra money from large customers, then 65% of that revenue increase is returned to the other customers.

Change is coming to the U.S. electricity system, but nobody is sure how much. The methods by which states are trying to allocate the cost of that uncertainty vary, but the critical element is understanding their respective strengths and weaknesses to craft a system that is fair for everyone.

The “Lab to Unicorn Initiative”, announced as part of the European Startup and Scaleup Strategy, is now becoming a reality!

Under Horizon Europe, the European Commission has launched a call for proposals to support the development and interconnection of a network of leading and emerging startup and scaleup hubs across Europe.

With an indicative budget of €20 million, the call will co-fund selected projects up to 50% of eligible costs.

What the call offers:

• Enhanced Interconnectivity: 10 to 18 leading and emerging innovation hubs will gain mutual access to research infrastructures, investors, mentors, talents, and collaboration activities.

   

• Expanded Venture Building: The network will develop additional venture-building capacities, offering even more favorable conditions for current and future startups.

   

• Deep Tech Emphasis: The call targets hubs with strong research capabilities and sectoral expertise in deep tech areas from all over Europe.

   

Deadline for Applications: 10 March 2026

Learn more and apply via the dedicated call page

EN ROUTE TO BERLIN — As the 12:06 p.m. Intercity Express train to Berlin leaves the Swiss city of Bern and crosses the border into Germany, passengers reluctantly bid farewell to punctuality — a guarantee in the Alpine republic where trains run like clockwork.

Fifty-seven-year-old Elisabeth Eisel regularly takes this seven-hour train journey. “Trains in Switzerland are always on time, unless they’re arriving from Germany,” she says. “Harsh but true, sadly. It didn’t used to be the case.”

Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another myth about Teutonic efficiency. The German railway Deutsche Bahn’s long-distance “high-speed” trains are now among the least punctual in Europe. In October, the national rail operator broke its own poor record with roughly only half of all long-distance trains arriving without delay.

Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and “technical problems” — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.

After decades of neglect, the government has announced a 100-billion-euro investment in rail infrastructure. But Lukas Iffländer, vice chair of the railway passenger lobby group Pro Bahn, says it will take more than money to get German trains back on track.

“We are now paying the price for years and years of neglect, basically since 1998,” Iffländer says. It’s not just crumbling tracks and sticky signals that need attention, he explains, but the network operator’s overly bureaucratic infrastructure.

“Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated,” Iffländer says. “It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something.”

Iffländer says Deutsche Bahn is top heavy: While there are not enough train engineers and signal operators, there are too many managers sitting at desks.

German news weekly Der Spiegel recently reported that upper management has allegedly approved canceling long-distance trains to bump up punctuality ratings because canceled trains are not recorded in the statistics.

Deutsche Bahn declined NPR’s requests for an interview, but in a written statement it denied embellishing its data. It said that the Spiegel report is “based on chat messages between dispatchers,” not “actual data used for collecting statistics.”

On a different train — the 11:18 a.m. from Munich to Berlin — passengers are packed like sardines at double capacity because another fully booked Intercity Express was canceled at the very last minute.

The mood is surprisingly jolly, despite the fact that half of the passengers have been standing for more than four hours now — with no hope of getting through the crowded carriages to use the restroom.

Catherine Launay, 51, is lucky enough to have a seat. She’s from France and says she’s surprised passengers are not kicking up more of a fuss.

“If this had been a French train, there’d have been more of an uproar!” Launay quips. “In fact, French passengers would have revolted by now.”

In an effort to prevent aggressive passenger behavior toward train staff, Deutsche Bahn has launched a mockumentary series for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube about a train crew struggling to cope under increasingly preposterous conditions.

The fictional train staff’s dance routine to a techno beat, while singing “zenk yoo for träveling wiz Deutsche Bahn,” has gone down surprisingly well with passengers, even if they can’t actually watch it on board because the Wi-Fi can’t cope with streaming.

And as our train rattles along the track, it’s difficult to differentiate between Deutsche Bahn parody and reality. The train conductor wishes passengers a pleasant journey “as far as it’s possible,” adding “we should just about make it to Berlin.” The train car chortles.

But Deutsche Bahn is no laughing matter for Federal Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder, who recently warned that “many equate the malfunctioning of railways with the malfunctioning of our state.”

Many are putting their hopes in the railway company’s new CEO, Evelyn Palla, based on her track record at Austrian Federal Railways.

Palla announced plans this week to make Deutsche Bahn more trim and efficient by eliminating executive positions, but she warned that there’s so much to fix, it will take time.

As we finally pull into Berlin’s main train station, passengers are resigned to the fact that — whether it’s signal failure, humor failure or state failure — Germany’s trains appear to have gone off the rails.