This week, we read Europe 2031. It is not a comfortable read, and that is exactly why it earns a place on the reading list before 28 August.
Europe 2031 is a scenario report by MIT researcher Michiel Bakker and a group of co-authors. It imagines the next five years of the continent, and it opens with a number that is hard to argue with. Europe controls roughly 5 percent of the world's AI computing power. The United States controls around 80. The story that follows is fictional, but everything up to the middle of 2026 already happened.
The diagnosis, not the doom
What makes the report worth your time is not the doom. It is the diagnosis. The problem it describes is not that Europe is behind on AI. It is that Europe keeps talking about AI sovereignty as a policy goal, while the rest of the world treats compute, chips, power and capital as an industrial race. According to the authors, those are two different games: one played with position papers, the other with infrastructure and capital at a scale Europe has so far not matched.
"Two different games: one played with position papers, the other with infrastructure and capital at a scale Europe has so far not matched."
So why does this matter for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area?
So far, so continental. Why does this matter for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area?
Because if the frontier is being set somewhere else, the honest question stops being how does Europe win and becomes where can we still act. And the answer is smaller and closer than a continent. It is a region: the level where companies, government, knowledge institutions and young professionals are actually within reach of each other. That is where strategy stops being a document and starts being something you can build.
That is also why one of the sharpest sessions on 28 August is called "The MRA Doesn't Have an AI Problem." The point is deliberately provocative. The technology is rarely the thing holding us back. The conditions around it are: the energy, the infrastructure, the capital, the willingness to choose. And unlike the global compute race, those are things a region can actually decide about.
Europe 2031 is a warning written for policymakers. But the people who will live inside its consequences are already at work, making these decisions inside their own organisations, mostly without calling it sovereignty. On 28 August, we bring them into one room.
Which of these challenges — talent, infrastructure or capital — do you think will shape this region's future most?