With the EU looking to triple its data center capacity by 2032, Dell Technologies weighed in with its view on how European lawmakers can boost the continent's AI prowess.

The EU’s "AI Continent Action Plan," unveiled back in April, comprises a five-pillar plan to boost the bloc’s lagging digital infrastructure space, with initiatives ranging from scaling AI gigafactories to increasing access to high-quality data.

Dell weighed in with its own blueprint it believes will help European lawmakers boost the proposed AI plan, with suggestions such as strengthening grid resilience and modernization, to encouraging knowledge sharing between EU countries.

Dell said the core of its blueprint is ensuring there will be long-term public-private collaboration to “ensure Europe’s AI ambitions are matched with real-world capability and impact.”

“Europe has the opportunity to lead not only in responsible AI regulation, but in world-class AI innovation," Vivek Mohindra, SVP and chief strategy officer at Dell Technologies, wrote. "Our blueprint offers a practical roadmap to get there, together.”

More compute, better grids

Among Dell’s proposals is a demand to prioritise AI compute expansion. The U.S. tech giant said focusing on building out AI compute would help support increased demand for generative AI (genAI) services and enhance AI sovereignty.

The firm called for an infrastructure-first approach it said would “ensure Europe is competitive in the global AI landscape.”

“By addressing the growing compute demands and aligning infrastructure with strategic priorities, Europe can lay the groundwork for sustained leadership in AI innovation," the vendor noted.

The EU's proposed plan would vastly grow the 13 so-called AI factories already deployed on the continent, with some €20 billion ($22 billion) set aside to support private investment in AI gigafactories through the InvestAI fund.

Dell wants an EU-wide "AI Compute Scaling Target" that would provide a quantitative goal for the continent.

“This would help track progress in EU countries, enhance transparency for industry, and enable the [European Commission] to provide recommendations on how to achieve the target," Dell noted in its blueprint.

The company also called for the creation of special AI compute zones within the EU – dedicated areas where private and public players could support mammoth data center projects – a concept being floated in the UK as "AI Growth Zones."

Dell also recommended that the EU should strengthen its grid resilience, modernizing continental power supplies to ensure AI-intensive workloads do not overwhelm the existing power supply.

With escalating power demands from ever-increasing data centers, Europe finds itself in a position of needing to scale its dated grid infrastructure to meet the power requirements needed to support the proposed compute increases.

Dell called on EU lawmakers to launch dedicated funding streams to invest in sustainable computing, offering private players incentives to create more energy-efficient computing technologies and software architectures.

It also said the EU should prioritize the development of energy-efficient data centers, including funding and incentives to back liquid cooling projects and streamlining permitting processes for both public and private energy-efficient data centers and related infrastructure.

“This should be part of a broad, sustainable, and optimized integration of data centers in the European electric grid,” the blueprint document reads.

Dell joins the AI Act clock-stoppers

Among the most eye-catching recommendations was the request to streamline implementation of the EU’s AI Act with a “stop-the-clock mechanism to postpone its entry into application.”

The AI Act is a sweeping regulatory framework that governs the use of AI technologies deployed throughout the continent based on their likelihood to impact civil rights. It came into force last August, but businesses will be subject to the provisions beginning August 2, 2026.

Dell suggested the AI Act would impose “overly burdensome obligations” and called on lawmakers to remove potentially overlapping requirements.

It called for the AI Act to focus on systems that represent the highest risk. The regulation would categorize every AI system deployed in the EU – ranking them based on their potential impact on citizens’ rights. The higher the risk potential, the more stringent the obligations placed on the system, with applications like AI emotional recognition systems being outright banned.

Companies that fall foul of the AI Act would face hefty fines, ranging from $8 million or 1.5% of global annual revenue, up to $38 million or 7% of revenue.

Dell argued, however, that high-risk AI systems “should be narrowly and specifically defined as applications that directly perform critical decisions in sensitive domains.”

It called on the European Commission to clarify that general-purpose hardware and infrastructure components – such as servers, storage, and networking equipment – be classified as low risk “regardless of the context or to whom they are deployed.”

“It’s important that regulatory focus remains on the highest risk systems, without placing undue compliance burdens on the broader AI and machine learning ecosystem,” the tech giant stated.

Despite calling for the AI Act’s postponement, Dell was not among the companies that wrote to European regulators calling for the AI Act to be paused.

Some 46 companies, including ASML, Mercedes-Benz, and United Internet, argued that the AI Act imposes complexity that would hinder continental AI development.

They called for a two-year “clock stop” to allow more time for companies to get ready for the sweeping regulatory provisions.

Their call fell on deaf ears, it seems, with European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier saying: “There is no grace period. There is no pause.”

"I've seen, indeed, a lot of reporting, a lot of letters, and a lot of things being said on the AI Act,” Reuters reports Regnier telling a press conference. “Let me be as clear as possible, there is no stop the clock.”

Knowledge sharing to boost the public sector

Beyond offering incentives to scale and calling out existing policy proposals, Dell’s "Blueprint for Making Europe an AI Continent" called for the EU to provide guidance to help public sector procurement.

As part of a wider request for increased knowledge sharing, Dell said lawmakers should encourage information exchanges between member states to “increase efficiency of existing IT systems and networks and evaluate operational needs.”

The firm also called on the EU to adopt common practices and solutions for high-quality data sharing.

It suggests that with related guidelines, the EU could “optimize the use of public, private, and hybrid-cloud providers to enhance data control and security, access top-tier services, offer workload optimization flexibility, and manage costs effectively.”