Staff Report
Europe is racing to build out its own industrial artificial intelligence capabilities as China continues to pull ahead in deploying AI directly on factory floors, with European industrial giants betting that applied, sector-specific AI will prove more valuable than raw benchmark performance.
China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 alone, accounting for 54% of the global total, and its use of AI in key manufacturing scenarios reached 34.2% in the first half of 2026, up 5.5 percentage points from the same period a year earlier.
Companies including Siemens, ABB and Schneider Electric are positioning the continent to compete in industrial AI after largely missing out on producing world-leading consumer-facing chatbots comparable to competitors like DeepSeek or Claude, pivoting instead toward manufacturing-specific applications where European industrial expertise runs deep.
The European Union is establishing a network of 19 AI Factories spread across 16 member countries, an initiative designed to push AI adoption into industrial use cases while strengthening the bloc's broader sovereignty over applied AI technology, alongside proposed AI Gigafactories meant to scale up the approach further.
The strategy reflects a calculated bet that Europe's path to AI relevance runs not through building better general-purpose chatbots, but through embedding AI deeply into the specialized machinery and manufacturing processes the continent's industrial base already dominates, even as China's head start in actual factory-floor deployment continues to widen.
