{"id":141628,"date":"2025-11-19T12:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T12:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/141628\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T12:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T12:05:08","slug":"europes-defence-spending-spree-must-fund-domestic-ai-official-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/141628\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe\u2019s defence spending spree must fund domestic AI, official says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s surge in defence spending must also fund \u201cdisruptive\u201d technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing that can have military applications, the EU\u2019s tech chief has said.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine and US President Donald Trump\u2019s oscillating support for defending the continent have prompted a historic increase in military expenditure and investment in the arms industry. Some 10 per cent of that funding should be funnelled to nascent technologies developed in the EU, according to the bloc\u2019s technology and security commissioner Henna Virkkunen. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very important for the European Union to be sure that\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009our defence <\/a>industry is competitive in the future,\u201d she told the Financial Times. \u201cWe want to now encourage the member states to invest a bigger part, 10 per cent, to these disruptive technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under a defence industry \u201croad map\u201d to be put forward by the European Commission on Wednesday, defence procurement rules are set to be upgraded next year to make it faster and easier for smaller companies to win contracts and favour more European companies. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to especially boost our European technologies and European defence industry with these actions,\u201d Virkkunen said. \u201cIt\u2019s very important to look at the security aspect nowadays and that\u2019s why we have to of course look from where we are buying different products.\u201d <\/p>\n

Borrowing from Ukraine\u2019s wartime experience where small-scale manufacturers have developed critical weapons systems such as drones used by the country\u2019s armed forces, Brussels seeks to link deep-tech start-ups with traditional arms manufacturers, Virkkunen said. This would allow ideas to flow from labs and innovators faster into procurement pipelines, she argued.<\/p>\n

The initiative is part of a number of new EU proposals aimed at making the bloc more competitive on the global stage and reducing its reliance on products developed in the US and China. The EU has also sought to spur the creation of an \u201cAI continent\u201d after falling behind Beijing and Washington in the rollout of generative AI and robotics.<\/p>\n

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Virkkunen said that since Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, more than 230 defence start-ups have been created in the EU. To help them scale up, the commission will launch a \u20ac1bn \u201cfund of funds\u201d, backed by the European Investment Bank, she said. Finding sources of capital is one of the key hurdles for defence innovators.<\/p>\n

Virkkunen said Ukraine\u2019s battlefield had become \u201ca test bed for new technologies\u201d, offering lessons for the EU on how to accelerate innovation cycles. Brussels is already co-operating with Kyiv on defence tech. <\/p>\n

Others, however, have sounded a note of caution, pushing back at the notion that too much money was being poured into conventional systems.<\/p>\n

One of Germany\u2019s top procurement officials, vice admiral Carsten Stawitzki, warned on Tuesday that Ukraine was \u201cnot a blueprint\u201d for European rearmament. <\/p>\n

Ukraine had been forced to produce millions of drones, he told the Berlin Security Conference, being held 18-19 November, as a \u201cworkaround\u201d because it was lacking the capabilities western armies have. <\/p>\n

While he stressed he was \u201cnot a dinosaur\u201d and supported the adoption of innovative technologies, Stawitzki said that in the short term Germany was prioritising capabilities such as a shared nuclear deterrent, fighter jets and long-range missiles capable of striking deep into enemy territory \u2014 weapons that \u201cour Ukrainian friends unfortunately don\u2019t have\u201d. <\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Laura Pitel in Berlin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-141628","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}