Last week I had the pleasure of taking part in the founding edition of the Ponti Summit in Venice, organised by StateUp and the University of Warwick. The name is no accident. Ponti means “bridges”: connections between research and industry, capital and innovation, infrastructure, institutions and companies. And, in this case, between Italy, the UK and a Europe that has to decide what role it wants in the new global geography of technology.

On Thursday evening, several participants told me they were meeting people they would not normally come across. That was by design, and hearing it sharpened my sense that the value of Ponti lies in connecting capabilities that are often developed in smaller, separate clusters.

I arrived in Venice with a question I find increasingly central: does Europe really have what it takes to be a protagonist in the next phase of AI and critical technologies?

After Ponti, my answer is yes. Many of those capabilities already exist. The problem is connecting them.

Not just AI

AI is not only models and software. It is also physical: chips, data centres, energy, storage, materials and networks. And we will have to connect high-performance and quantum computing to the infrastructure we already have.

The day was built around four themes: the European compute stack, energy for compute and compute for energy, turning research into strategic companies, and putting technology to work in critical systems.

When we talk about European tech resilience, it is easy to think a European AI model or new rules will be enough. They won’t. Resilience covers the whole stack: energy, chips, compute, data, capital, and the ability to take a technology to market.

“If you try to copy what other countries or companies have done, you’ll fail. You need to create instead.”

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli set the challenge

My takeaway from the following sessions was that Europe may be particularly well placed to create at the intersections between fields and infrastructure still too often treated separately.

European fragmentation is usually discussed in terms of markets. Ponti raised a parallel, interconnected question: can Europe bring its capabilities together to create new, purposeful products and systems? Three intersections stood out:

• Quantum, AI and HPC: connecting public supercomputing infrastructure, quantum, AI compute, research and industrial users through better access, orchestration and validation.
• Energy for compute: connecting computational demand more intelligently with energy availability, efficiency and clean energy.
• Capital: calls for something closer to a “European Nasdaq” reflected the familiar gap between building strong companies and having the depth of capital to scale them.

Capital, and the people in the room

Capital matters most. Good research is not enough. It has to become a company, and that company needs funding, infrastructure and customers. That is why it felt right to end the day with the Capital Commons, where the goal was to find opportunities worth following up after Venice.

Ponti also put in one room people who rarely work together: researchers, supercomputing centres, investors, industry, financial institutions and government. Europe has the ingredients. What it lacks is the system. We need stronger links between these worlds, and a shorter path from research to business, and from capital to infrastructure.

A European question, and an Italian one

This matters a lot for Italy. Strong in research, supercomputing, advanced manufacturing, energy and materials. The question is whether we can connect them, and plug them into wider European and international alliances.

No European country alone will match the scale of the US or China. The answer is not going it alone. It is strategic interdependence: deciding where to build our own capabilities, where to partner, and where we must avoid depending too much on others.

My main takeaway is simple. In Europe, we talk a lot about AI, regulation and digital resilience, and these things matter. But what will decide the outcome is how well we can build things like companies, infrastructure, computing capacity, technology supply chains and patient capital for deep tech. Most importantly, we need to build relationships between people who have different parts of the same puzzle.

Technological resilience is not declared. It has been built. Europe already has its riverbanks. Now, it must build the bridges. Venice was the perfect place to start.