Dutch tech leaders: Europe won’t lead in AI hardware, but can in AI apps

The race to dominate AI infrastructure has left Europe trailing the US — but the continent still has a shot at global leadership in AI apps.

That was the verdict of Dutch tech leaders at the Assembly, the invite-only policy track of TNW Conference in Amsterdam.

While Silicon Valley controls the scaffolding for AI, they urged Europe to focus on building apps on top.

Leading the call was Jeroen van Glabbeek, CEO and founder of CM.com, a customer engagement platform with a market cap of around €217mn and annual revenues of €274mn in 2024.

Van Glabbeek believes the US advantage in AI infrastructure could become a launchpad for European software. “The infrastructure is already there,” he said.

That infrastructure is being built with unprecedented investment. In 2025 alone, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft plan to spend over $300bn (€261bn) combined on data centres, networking, and cloud services for AI, according to CNBC.

Van Glabbeek called it “the biggest investment in technology in the history of mankind.”

European tech firms can’t match this scale of spending on hardware. But they can capitalise by building AI apps on the foundations laid in the US.

Europe already has a strong record of building top-tier apps, from Spotify and Grammarly to Revolut and Klarna. In the AI era, Van Glabbeek envisions a new wave of them emerging from the region.

“We won’t win the hyperscaler AI platform play, but there’s still something positive to compete for — and it’s on the application side,” he said.

The sentiment was echoed by other tech leaders on stage.

Sohrab Hosseini, co-founder of Amsterdam-based generative AI startup Orq.ai, highlighted the opportunities at the “orchestration and application levels,” while Lucien Burm, President of the Dutch Startup Association, pointed to where the profit lies.

“The money is probably to be made in the application layer,” he said. “We’re not going to win that much in very deep AI hardware tech.”

To fulfil Europe’s AI potential, the speakers called for a trio of financial changes: greater risk appetite from investors, less red tape around public funding, and more local procurement. But their most pressing demand is one that reverberates across the continent’s tech sector: innovation-friendly regulation.