Carlo Denza : 28 October 2025 15:07
Von der Leyen launches “AI First” at Italian Tech Week: three obstacles to overcome and a €2 billion startup lost along the way.
Turin, October 3, 2025. Before thousands of entrepreneurs and investors at the OGR, Ursula von der Leyen launched her vision: “AI First.” And to explain the urgency of this revolution, the President of the European Commission told a story that still stings: that of the Italian startup Kong , which was forced to cross the Atlantic to find someone who believed in it.
It all began with two young men from Milan, in a basement, with a winning idea. They spent three years seeking funding in Italy: no one was willing to take the risk. In 2010, Kong (cloud digital infrastructure management) landed in the United States. Within days, its first investors were found. Today, the startup is worth $2 billion and its logo lights up Times Square.
This is the story that von der Leyen has chosen as a manifesto for the European problem: the talent is there, but it lacks an ecosystem, a breeding ground to nurture it. Looking at the audience at Italian Tech Week , she declared: “I see this audience and I think there’s no shortage of talent,” adding: ” The problem is that talent alone isn’t enough: we need an environment that knows how to recognize it .”
But since 2010, something has changed: in Italy, venture capital investments have increased by 600% over the last decade. But that’s not all. Von der Leyen has identified three barriers Europe must overcome to compete in the global AI race.
So, in Europe, the problem isn’t a lack of money: household savings reach €1.4 trillion, compared to €800 billion in the United States. What’s lacking is risk capital. Only 24% of European financial wealth is invested in equity, compared to 42% in the United States.
And the answer? A multibillion-dollar fund. It’s called Scaleup Europe , which will invest in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and clean tech.
How can a startup avoid having to navigate 27 different sets of laws to expand in Europe? Von der Leyen has proposed the “28th regime”: a single set of rules applicable across the entire Union.
“A startup in San Francisco can easily expand throughout the United States. We need to have the same opportunity in Europe,” the president emphasized.
The most painful point. The slow adoption of technology, the same mistake that caused Europe to miss the digital revolution thirty years ago. Von der Leyen has chosen not to repeat it.
The strategy is called ” AI First “: when faced with any problem, the first question must be “how can artificial intelligence help us?”
In Turin, the automotive city, the president launched the idea of a network of European cities to test autonomous vehicles. Sixty Italian mayors have already raised their hands.
The President of the European Commission, a physician by training, says she’s amazed by what can be achieved in medicine today with the help of new technologies: early diagnoses, accelerated development of innovative drugs, personalized care.
“AI adoption must be widespread, and Europe wants to help accelerate it. We will create a European network of advanced AI-based medical screening centers,” he announced. First-class care throughout Europe.
As we’ve previously discussed on Red Hot Cyber , supercomputers are machines capable of performing trillions of operations per second. But why are they crucial to artificial intelligence?
The answer is simple: training an AI model requires immense computing power . Reaching petaflop computing capabilities, testing millions of parameters on billions of data points. Without supercomputers, modern AI would not exist.
Ten years ago, only one of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world was in Europe. Today, four are among the top ten, and two are in Italy. “We have proven the skeptics wrong,” von der Leyen declared proudly.
It’s proof that Europe can compete when it invests with conviction. But in the race for artificial intelligence, having the hardware isn’t enough: you also need an ecosystem that knows how to exploit it . And it’s precisely here that the three obstacles identified by the president become crucial.
The race to artificial intelligence has just begun. It remains to be seen whether Europe will actually be able to stop its Kongs from crossing the ocean this time.
Carlo Denza