This viral Stripe chart shouldn't surprise anyone. It's EU policy coming to its conclusion. This is what we get when we celebrate publishing regulatory pdfs and closing critical energy sources. We should get used to charts like this. So when I speak Europeans campaigning (aka glueing-their-hand-to-something) for all this degrowth wankery, I'm always puzzled as to why exactly. The degrowth is already here—it's just not evenly distributed Here's 9 facts 1. Productivity growth numbers in the US vastly outpaces EU equivalents. (e.g. 2022→2025 shows a 7x difference) 2. The tech sector alone explains accounts for ⅔ of the EU–US productivity gap since 2000, according to ECB. 3. In 2024 + 2025, 5 AI heavy companies—Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon—accounted for 40% of the S&P 500’s total return. 4. Competing in AI requires 3 essential ingredients: capable models, advanced chips, and affordable electricity. So naturally the EU is working against this. 5. Electricity: EU prices for energy-intensive industries are ~2x US levels and 50% above China’s, according to the IEA. Why is this? 6. European governments left themselves dangerously dependent imported gas, while also pulling batshit moves like closing nuclear plants. EU carbon pricing added insult to injury. 7. Models: The EU AI Act adds compliance requirements, training-data + copyright policies, and plenty of risk-management obligations. As with all things EU they'll never explain fully how to be compliant until you're in court. The result: is minimal model development in EU and very delayed AI product+feature roll out from big (easy-to-fine) companies. 8. Chips: Europe’s semiconductor ambitions are undermined by insufficient investment, fragmented funding, slow delivery, and of course high operating costs. Net effect is they're on course to miss their 2030 goals by >40% 9. Putting it all together, we’re making it harder and more expensive to resource, build and deploy AI in Europe, and risking another decade of falling behind. The result will be even slower growth relative to the rest of the world. – at Dublin City, Ireland

The first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have one. Thank you Mario Draghi for say the important thing out loud in front of the audience that needs to hear it the most.