30 years ago and 40 years ago, respectively
It’s likely that something significant is going on in Europe that we don’t know about yet.
The EU Horizon 2020 budget is 70 billion EUR, spent over basically 6 years. Around 80 billion is now being spent as post-pandemic stimulus, but less than what was proposed by the Commission.
That said, you're probably right that US pumps hundreds of billions into "innovation" (let's say R&D) whereas it's just a hundred for the EU.
Fortunately the EU is catching up, but alas it's not because it's so aggressively allocating more for R&D, though the trend is positive, but the US' trend is at best flat, maybe even negative: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (Of course these are GDP percentages, and since the US' economy is bigger, the absolute numbers are a lot bigger for the US. And that's why even though Japan's percentage looks best, their absolute amount is below what the EU spends on R&D.)