Europe won't be a leader in AI unless they get huge capital investment and datacenter build up. Sadly the regulatory environment of Europe combined with brain drain to America means it won't happen
Commercialisation of research is still hard in comparison to the USA, though.
Americans will get to enjoy their rusty infrastructure and polluted air, and Europe will have lean and clean infra to support just what's needed.
In certain domains there are no ceilings to return on compute. For example, offensive/defensive cybersecurity, it will be an arms race of who has more compute to patch up against more sophisticated attacks, and who runs more sophisticated attacks
>Americans will get to enjoy their rusty infrastructure and polluted air,
America has very high air quality and fairly good infrastructure given their population density.
LLMs on the other hand have only been around for a few years. Large technological breakthroughs are much more likely.
In addition, I don't think the future is billions of people chatting with ChatGPT all day. LLMs can write deterministic code for many things, and in the end, we only need their "intelligence" and brittleness in relatively few scenarios. So, with good optimization, we shouldn't need so many huge data centers.
On the topic of clean air, the US is relatively spared at the moment because past governments were more reasonable. But just wait a couple of years under the current leadership and you'll see. Just from this morning, look at the top comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214017
The present situation must be seen as a sort of "keep alive" state, where we do something unsustainable until we can achieve takeoff, but we can only actually start up for real once we start making the machines we need.
If NVIDIA's margins were 20% or something, this wouldn't be the case, but they aren't.