Europe 2031, a speculative thought experiment published by the Brussels-based Arq Foundation, has circulated widely in EU policy circles and social media.
The piece sketches a 2031 in which heavy US datacentre and compute investment and Chinese robotics leave Europe dependent, economically weakened and vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and it ran a day before the Trump administration blocked “foreign nationals” from using Anthropic’s Fable.
Maximilian Negele, a co-author, said there is an "incredible translation barrier" between Brussels and San Francisco.
The fiction follows a Brussels official who fails to persuade colleagues to invest while American firms restructure around AI and, in the scenario, come to control around 70% of global compute.
The authors name-check large deals and projects that the report notes have already faltered: the $100bn OpenAI-Nvidia agreement evaporated in February, the $300bn OpenAI-Oracle pact "seems doubtful", and OpenAI pulled out of the Texas datacentre project the scenario references.
The text anticipates objections, arguing isolated company failures would not change the broader strategic imbalance it models.
Arq Foundation describes itself as "neither an advocacy NGO nor a venture-backed startup" and does not disclose who funds it.
Brussels politicians have raised the scenario in parliamentary debates and bilateral discussions as conversations about technological sovereignty intensify.
