LONDON – A panel at this week's DCD Compute 2025 event warned that AI investment only works with the network investment to back it up – while adding that recent AI mega-investments in the U.K. will ultimately benefit U.S. vendors.

Neil McRae, chief network strategist for Juniper Networks, represented the networking view during the DCD panel, with the London-based exec admitting that European AI deployment lags behind every other region, with a lack of consumer demand potentially hobbling the continent’s AI ambitions.

McRae said Europe was “back of the queue” when it came to the supply chain, and that expertise was thin on the ground compared to the U.S. and Asia. The exec revealed his contributions to a U.K. government white paper on AI innovation ensured more of a priority from Britain on building out talent as opposed to building out network backbones.

“We don’t pay for talent,” McRae explained, referring to Europe as a whole.

Walter Goodwin, CEO and founder of British AI chipmaker Fractile, disagreed, saying the talent was there in Europe and the continent would give rise to a trillion-dollar unicorn at some point.

Network underfunding will burst the AI bubble

Juniper also sees a global AI networking challenge tied to the lack of plumbing at work to actually power the AI running through today’s data centers.

“I don’t see companies investing in networks as a strategic asset, but more as a cost-based problem,” McRae told SDxCentral.

Nilesh Shah, strategic advisor for ZeroPoint Technologies, concurred, mentioning that AI-native neocloud firms “spend money on Blackwells but skimp on the network," affecting their rentability.

Shah also raised doubts over both recent AI mega-investments on U.K. shores and the European Union's (EU) data ambitions.

The semiconductor exec questioned the level of detail and commitment in ensuring data sovereignty, reminding event attendees that it was impossible across the full-stack supply chain of memory, silicon, and beyond. Shah added that while Europe may be advancing on data centers and silicon, the continent “may never achieve full stack” and thus will always rely on third-party nations.

“If you double-click on memory devices, who's making that memory? You need storage in the stack, using SSDs from China. Even within compute, you’re still dependent on Asia," Shah said.

In other words, even if cloud data is kept within EU borders, the underlying mechanisms make a mockery of the idea of sanctity. The same stack equation also raised questions around Europe’s talk on sustainability, on which the continent has shown leadership compared to other territories.

“It’s easy to talk about sustainability after build out, when you weren't so green," Shah said. "If you’re doing sustainability, you need to do it across the full stack.”

U.K. and AI return on investment

Shah added it was less than helpful to classify Europe as “one big blob" made up of many countries, while nations like the U.K. aren't even in the EU.

On the subject of Britain, the DCD Compute panel happened in the shadow of some big U.K. investments made to coincide with U.S. President Donald Trump’s state visit. A string of data center-related investments was confirmed this week, including a $6.9 billion Google deal, a $678 million BlackRock venture, the country’s largest supercomputer proposed by Microsoft, and OpenAI's Stargate U.K.

Nvidia also partnered with AI infrastructure company Nscale to scale up 300,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs globally, with up to 60,000 GPUs in the U.K.

Shah again urged caution, reminding that Nvidia's push for AI data centers won’t require the manpower needed for communities to feel any kind of economic boom.

“AI data centers are homogenous," Shah said, adding, "it doesn’t take too many humans to run them.”

In the exec's view, this means the biggest benefit wasn't for local communities but for the U.S.-based companies powering infrastructure in both the U.K. and Europe, casting further doubt on a true definition of sovereignty.

“Does it count as sovereign if all the dollars are flowing back to the U.S.?” Shah asked.

The real way forward

With these various doubts hanging in the air, Rohit Mittal, senior director of product and technology for Upscale AI, suggested a way forward for Europe was to first focus on its key differentiator in the market – sustainability – with everything else able to fall into place thereafter.

“Europe is beholden to whoever’s scaled out before,” Mittal said. “It’s not strong much on data, but it is strong on low power. … Build your workforce for low power, and build the story from there.”

Mittal also gave a U.S.-based point of view on sovereignty, saying the scope of AI means every country needs to safeguard citizens' data.

McRae concurred, noting that all the talk of EU sovereignty has made people forget the U.K. government doesn’t have its own push for sovereign cloud.

“I think that’s a mistake,” the Juniper exec said.