Sure! I haven’t done any serious research on this particular topic, so the sentence expresses more of a general worry (derived from how I think the political economic system generally tends to function).
The worry, in brief, is something like this: Large industrial projects in Europe are governed by fairly stringent environmental and social/labour standards. Such projects take more time and are more expensive than they would be if there were fewer / less stringent standards. Corporate actors thus often advocate for a loosening of standards, which [in my understanding of the world] would benefit their private interests at the expense of our collective interests in environmental protection and decent working conditions (the latter furthers social stability, a collective good). Competitiveness-related arguments are regularly employed in order to shift the debate to privilege private interests over collective interests, by making it seem that the two are synonymous [the belief that they are not synonymous is, again, based in my understanding of the world / political economy].
I think there is good reason to believe that European efforts to attract data centre build-outs by/in collaboration with US frontier companies would lead to a weakening of the environmental and social/labour standards that would usually govern such large industrial projects. Beyond this, I think there might be AI-related regulations that become weakened, or pre-empted, if corporate interests succeed in depicting AI infrastructure (and a friendly regulatory environment for such infrastructure) as an essential element in preserving European wealth and prosperity.
Sure! I haven’t done any serious research on this particular topic, so the sentence expresses more of a general worry (derived from how I think the political economic system generally tends to function).
The worry, in brief, is something like this: Large industrial projects in Europe are governed by fairly stringent environmental and social/labour standards. Such projects take more time and are more expensive than they would be if there were fewer / less stringent standards. Corporate actors thus often advocate for a loosening of standards, which [in my understanding of the world] would benefit their private interests at the expense of our collective interests in environmental protection and decent working conditions (the latter furthers social stability, a collective good). Competitiveness-related arguments are regularly employed in order to shift the debate to privilege private interests over collective interests, by making it seem that the two are synonymous [the belief that they are not synonymous is, again, based in my understanding of the world / political economy].
I think there is good reason to believe that European efforts to attract data centre build-outs by/in collaboration with US frontier companies would lead to a weakening of the environmental and social/labour standards that would usually govern such large industrial projects. Beyond this, I think there might be AI-related regulations that become weakened, or pre-empted, if corporate interests succeed in depicting AI infrastructure (and a friendly regulatory environment for such infrastructure) as an essential element in preserving European wealth and prosperity.