The European Union cannot match U.S. spending on data centers, but it can preserve its technological autonomy by creating an exchange-traded market for AI compute.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, a commentary piece titled "Why Europe Needs to Invest in the AI Compute Market Rather Than Building Data Centers" by Ivo Prokopiev has been published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Comparing the vast AI investment gap between the United States and Europe, the piece proposes that Brussels launch a standardized compute market linked to Europe's power grid before the Chicago Mercantile Exchange cements a global monopoly on pricing computing power. A summary of the piece follows below.
The value-added gap between electricity and AI processing is the main driver of the global data-center boom: in 2025, buying a megawatt-hour of electricity on Europe's wholesale markets cost around $95 (€83) on average, but running that same power through servers equipped with the newest AI chips and renting them out at Amazon's list prices generates roughly $8,540 in revenue—nearly 90 times the cost of the electricity. According to a 2026 Bruegel estimate, the EU holds just 5 percent of global AI computing capacity compared to roughly 78 percent for the United States; moreover, the European Commission's €200 billion "InvestAI" plan amounts to only one-third of the more than $700 billion that Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are spending this year alone.
While Europe cannot compete with American tech giants' capital expenditure on building data centers, Washington is taking another step to dominate the financial market for AI. Chicago's CME Group and its rival ICE are preparing to launch compute futures trading in November. History shows that whoever sets the benchmark price for a commodity dominates its market—just as London still handles over 90 percent of euro interest-rate swaps after Brexit. If Chicago's pricing becomes the global yardstick, Europe—already dependent on the United
States for chips and 70 percent of its cloud market—will be reduced to a passive "price-taker."
Europe's strength lies in its track record of building infrastructure markets and power exchanges. In 2025, power trading volume in Germany exceeded 6,000 terawatt-hours—more than ten times the country's annual consumption—and power purchase agreements enabled banks to finance wind farms. Currently, AI compute is sold through private deals, and European banks refuse to lend to new data centers due to the lack of a transparent price benchmark.
To overcome this hurdle, the EU should work through the European Energy Exchange (EEX) and EPEX SPOT to, first, publish a daily reference price index for renting each generation of chips and, second, create standardized, exchange-traded contracts combining "delivered electricity and compute capacity" inside the EU. Under its proposed Cloud and AI
Development Act, the European Commission can secure political commitment by the end of 2026, launch a pilot index in 2027, and operationalize a full power-and-compute contract by 2028.
To seed initial liquidity, the EU and the 18 member states that have agreed to jointly purchase compute time from AI gigafactories can act as the market's first buyers, while the European Investment Bank (EIB) can provide guarantees covering first losses to reduce risk for private lenders. Establishing separate indices for each chip generation while keeping the exchange open to Asian, American, and Persian Gulf firms would allow Brussels to claim a decisive stake in setting the rules of the global AI economy./ Source
