Europe missed out on building the AI labs, and is quietly cashing in anyway. The continent’s established tech and industrial giants have emerged as unexpected winners of the AI boom, according to Reuters, even as its startups struggle to rival OpenAI or Google. Europe has fretted openly about its AI sovereignty, dependent on American models and clouds for the frontier work its own firms cannot yet match. Europe is profiting from AI while remaining dependent on others for the intelligence itself, a comfortable position that is also a fragile one. Europe may not have built the future of AI, but it is selling a great deal of what that future runs on.