Intentional Power: Europe Between Negawatts and Realpolitik
AI runs on energy. Europe’s grid isn’t ready. I’m starting to see how digital strategy, infrastructure, and sovereignty all connect.
Artificial intelligence runs on energy. That’s something I hadn’t fully appreciated until recently. Every digital service, every model deployment, every GPU cluster puts pressure on the grid. And that pressure is rising fast—especially here in Europe.
So this isn’t just an energy story. It’s a digital one. And it touches on sovereignty too.
I’m starting to see how these things connect. And because I work in digital strategy and infrastructure, it feels worth sharing some thoughts—not as conclusions, but as part of a broader exploration.
I’ve always liked the idea of negawatts.
Slim systems. Thoughtful use. A resilient, considered approach to energy. The kind of thinking that values intention over indulgence. That mindset has shaped a lot of European energy policy—and it aligns with how I tend to approach digital work too. Efficiency, clarity, design with purpose.
But recently I’ve been noticing a tension.
Because we also need scale. Growth. And real power to run the tools we now rely on.
From Less to More: The Shift in Energy Thinking
Negawatts—using less energy instead of producing more—made a lot of sense when carbon reduction was the central challenge. It still does. But something has changed.
Electric vehicles, heat pumps, and AI workloads are all increasing demand on a grid that hasn’t kept up. In many parts of Europe, it hasn’t grown much at all in the last decade. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs expects European power demand to rise 10–15% by 2030, mostly due to AI.
That’s a shift I hadn’t really internalised. But it’s starting to feel very real.
A World That Builds Faster Than We Debate
Other regions are moving differently. The US-UAE AI deal, for example, gave Abu Dhabi access to half a million Nvidia chips and a 5-gigawatt energy base to power them—all within 100 milliseconds of Europe’s biggest cities.
It made me wonder: what exactly are we building here? And how quickly can we build it?
Maximilian Schreiner
Digital Sovereignty Needs Power
I hear a lot about digital sovereignty in European discussions. But it’s clearer to me now that sovereignty doesn’t just mean policy. It means infrastructure. Cables, chips, campuses and electricity to run them.
This is where the negawatt mindset starts to feel incomplete. Not wrong, just not quite enough on its own.
We still need that focus on intention. But we also need the ability to scale and otherwise the ideas we care about don’t have anywhere to live.
Strategic Materials: The Hidden Layer of Sovereignty
There’s also the question of materials. A lot of the things we need, GPUs, EVs, wind turbines, depend on rare earths. And most of the world’s refining capacity is in China.
Europe might shape policy, but we don’t mine the metals. That’s a dependency that’s hard to ignore if we’re serious about autonomy.
What If We Built with Intention and Capacity?
This has led me to a question I keep coming back to: can we build systems that are both abundant and intentional?
Not just more energy, but infrastructure that reflects how we want to live and work—supporting autonomy, resilience, and room to grow. Not everything needs to scale, but when it does, it should be for the right reasons.
Industrial atrophy will follow. High-energy processes (steel, chemicals, semiconductors) migrate to jurisdictions that guarantee 24/7 clean power at predictable prices, eroding the continent’s industrial tax base. Azeem Azar, Exponential View.
This Is a Strategic Question Now
Even if you’re mostly working in digital, this matters. Because we’re not just building tools—we’re building dependencies. And if we don’t create the conditions for those tools to run on our terms, someone else will.
We Need a New Imagination
I’m still thinking this through. But I’ve come to believe that energy, digital strategy, and sovereignty are now one conversation.
Constraint has shaped Europe’s identity for decades. Maybe that doesn’t need to change. But perhaps it’s time we added something new alongside it: the ability to build at a scale that reflects what we actually want to protect.
Not for excess. Just for agency.
And maybe now is the time to start saying that out loud.
Azeem Azhar
Nathan Benaich