Europe is at risk of over-restricting AI and falling behind U.S. and China, Dutch prince says
Prince Constantijn is special envoy to Techleap, a Dutch startup accelerator.
Patrick Van Katwijk | Getty Images
AMSTERDAM — Europe is at risk of falling behind the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence as it focuses on regulating the technology, according to Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.
“Our ambition seems to be limited to being good regulators,” Constantijn told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.
Prince Constantijn is the third and youngest son of former Dutch Queen Beatrix and the younger brother of reigning Dutch King Willem-Alexander.
He is special envoy of the Dutch startup accelerator Techleap, where he works to help local startups grow fast internationally by improving their access to capital, market, talent, and technologies.
“We’ve seen this in the data space [with GDPR], we’ve seen this now in the platform space, and now with the AI space,” Constantijn added.
European Union regulators have taken a tough approach to artificial intelligence, with formal regulations limiting how developers and companies can apply the technology in certain scenarios.
The bloc gave final approval to the EU AI Act, a ground-breaking AI law, last month.
Officials are concerned by how quickly the technology is advancing and risks it poses around jobs displacement, privacy, and algorithmic bias.
The law takes a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the tech are treated differently depending on their risk level.
For generative AI applications, the EU AI Act sets out clear transparency requirements and copyright rules.
All generative AI systems would have to make it possible to prevent illegal output, to disclose if content is produced by AI and to publish summaries of the copyrighted data used for training purposes.
But the EU’s Ai Act requires even stricter scrutiny for high-impact, general-purpose AI models that could pose “systemic risk,” such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 — including thorough evaluations and compulsory reporting of any “serious incidents.”
Prince Constantijn said he’s “really concerned” that the Europe’s focus has been more on regulating AI than trying to become a leader innovating in the space.
“It’s good to have guardrails. We want to bring clarity to the market, predictability and all that,” he told CNBC earlier this month on the sidelines of Money 20/20. “But it’s very hard to do that in such a fast-moving space.”
“There are big risks in getting it wrong, and like we’ve seen in genetically modified organisms, it hasn’t stopped the development. It just stopped Europe developing it, and now we are consumers of the product, rather than producers able to influence the market as it develops.”
Between 1994 and 2004, the EU had imposed an effective moratorium on new approvals of genetically modified crops over perceived health risks associated with them.
The bloc subsequently developed strict rules for GMOs, citing a need to protect citizens’ health and the environment. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences says that genetically modified crops are safe for both human consumption and the environment.
Constantijn added that Europe is making it “quite hard” for itself to innovate in AI due to “big restrictions on data,” particularly when it comes to sectors like health and medical science.
In addition, the U.S. market is “a much bigger and unified market” with more free-flowing capital, Constantijn said. On these points he added, “Europe scores quite poorly.”
“Where we score well is, I think, on talent,” he said. “We score well on technology itself.”
Plus, when it comes to developing applications that use AI, “Europe is definitely going to be competitive,” Constantijn noted. He nevertheless added that “the underlying data infrastructure and IT infrastructure is something we’ll keep depending on large platforms to provide.”
Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc., during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
CoreWeave on Thursday announced a $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, expanding its current agreement with the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT.
The new agreement brings the AI cloud infrastructure provider’s total contracts with OpenAI to $22.5 billion.
“This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training workloads at an unmatched pace,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
In March, CoreWeave announced an $11.9-billion agreement with OpenAI to provide AI datacenters and technology over five years. Intrator told CNBC in May that the companies expanded the agreement by $4 billion.
CoreWeave, which went public in March, makes money by renting out data centers packed with numerous Nvidia graphics processing units. The company is backed by Nvidia and makes a significant chunk of its revenue from Microsoft, which is a key investor in OpenAI.
At the time of its prospectus, CoreWeave said it operated 32 datacenters powered over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs.
Earlier this month, CoreWeave’s share price popped after the company disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia.
WATCH: CoreWeave CEO: Building AI infrastructure will require trillions in public-private investment
Technology
Databricks commits to $100 million in OpenAI spending as high-valued startups team up in AI
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi.
Databricks
OpenAI and Databricks are two of the most highly valued tech startups on the planet. Now they’re working together.
Databricks, a data analytics software vendor, said Thursday that it has committed to spending $100 million over multiple years with OpenAI. Databricks is making it easier for customers to connect their data stored in its cloud service with GPT-5, announced in August, and other OpenAI models.
OpenAI, which was recently valued by private investors at $500 billion, has become a household name in the years since the launch of its ChatGPT in late 2022. In partnering with Databricks, valued at more than $100 billion in its latest funding round, OpenAI has landed its first formal integration with a business-focused product vendor, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, in a news conference Wednesday.
Lightcap said the company’s “aspiration is a multiple” of the $100 million spending commitment in terms of revenue the agreement will generate.
Databricks has formed similar partnerships with Google and with Anthropic. But OpenAI is leading the way with more than 700 million people using its ChatGPT assistant, powered by GPT-5, every week.
The company was making enterprise more of a focus even before the Databricks deal. Microsoft has been bringing OpenAI models into businesses, governments and schools. And OpenAI has been building up its own sales function.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the partnership will simplify the process for its customers when it comes to accessing OpenAI’s models, which they’ve already been using in large numbers.
Until now, if a Databricks customer wanted to tap a proprietary OpenAI model to help analyze internal data, it would have required extensive configuration, as well as legal and security sign-off.
“The key difference here is that any database customer automatically now, just by clicking in the UI, can start using this product,” Ghodsi said, referring to the user interface. Ghodsi said the price is similar to what it would cost if the user went directly to OpenAI.
Greg Ulrich, Mastercard‘s chief AI and data officer, said he’s optimistic about the integration.
“It enables opportunity for research and targeted experimentation, using AI to solve new problems, bringing value to customers, enhancing employee productivity, in an environment that we trust, that we know,” Ulrich said.
It’s an increasingly competitive space.
Databricks rival Snowflake, which has a market cap of $75 billion, announced an expansion of its Microsoft partnership in February, enabling the use of OpenAI models. Oracle, which has a $300 billion cloud contract from OpenAI, said two weeks ago that in October it will launch a service for running Google, OpenAI and xAI models on data stored in its database software.
Databricks said earlier this month that it now generates more than $4 billion in annualized revenue, growing over 50% year over year, with $1 billion coming from AI products. The company’s $100 billion valuation was announced alongside a $1 billion funding round.
OpenAI and Databricks ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.
WATCH: Databricks CEO: ‘Agentic’ AI era will disrupt the whole database industry
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment12 months agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024