Bundesbank board member calls for an AI Airbus and says Europe is a price-taker in IT

Serguey Asael Shinder13 October 2026, 06:542 min read

Fritzi Köhler-Geib, a member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, opened a roundtable on "Preparing for transformative AI" in Brussels on 1 October 2026. The statement, published by the BIS, frames frontier AI as part of digital sovereignty — and touches the central bank's own concerns about prices and its own procurement.

Why a central banker cares. Köhler-Geib says Europe is "mostly a price-taker in the IT sector", and that this could affect the price level if the oligopoly in this market is not broadened — besides the risk of missing growth. The statement also calls cybersecurity based on high-performance AI models "a matter of survival for Europe".

The proposals. Köhler-Geib co-authored a paper earlier this year with Claudia Plattner, president of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, and Kristina Sinemus, Hesse's digital minister, containing 37 implementation-oriented measures linking AI, chips, cloud, robotics and quantum computing. Three points from the roundtable:

• Chips and AI together. Training frontier models in Europe needs data centres, and with conventional chips energy supply is a constraint. The statement points to European research in photonic chips, described as significantly more energy-efficient and "ready to go into mass production now".
• Pooled public demand and private capital, including through the savings and investment union, the "28th regime" and EU Inc. The Bundesbank is tendering for EU-native cloud services for a large part of its multi-cloud strategy, and the Eurosystem is pursuing EU-native cloud providers in large programmes such as bank reporting.
• An "AI Airbus": at least one more European-trained large language model besides Mistral — a European corporation building on an existing open-source model, hosted on European infrastructure — plus specialised models trained on Europe's industrial data.

The Airbus analogy. Köhler-Geib recounts asking Jean-Claude Trichet why Europe had an Airbus in aviation but not in other sectors; his answer was that Europe trailed far behind the US, had no European champion, and had political leaders who cleared roadblocks — conditions the statement sees as present for AI today.

What it is and is not. The statement is a policy argument by a board member, not a Bundesbank or Eurosystem decision; its concrete institutional element is the Bundesbank's own cloud tender.

Source: Deutsche Bundesbank, introductory statement by Fritzi Köhler-Geib, published by the BIS — https://www.bis.org/speeches/20261008-introductory-statement-roundtable-preparing-transformative-ai