Dan Ives warns Europe must pick between AI growth and climate rules

Dan Ives is putting his finger on a structural constraint in the AGI race: power. His argument that Europe must choose between aggressive AI build‑out and its existing climate framework reflects a growing consensus that GPUs are no longer the only bottleneck—reliable, cheap electricity is. If EU rules force every AI data center to jump through complex efficiency and disclosure hoops, while the U.S. and Gulf states happily burn more fossil fuel, the geography of frontier AI capacity could tilt decisively away from Europe.

For the race to AGI, this matters less because Europe will never build advanced models, and more because the locus of experimentation, deployment and monetization could shift. If leading labs and hyperscalers decide it’s easier to scale multi‑gigawatt AI campuses in Texas or the Middle East than within the EU, Europe risks becoming a regulation‑heavy consumer of AGI rather than a producer. That changes who sets de facto technical and safety standards.

The piece also underlines a political reality: as AI’s energy footprint becomes impossible to ignore, more regions will face the same trade‑off. How Europe balances its Green Deal with AI competitiveness will be an early template others study or consciously reject.