As a transatlantic firm, Giant is privileged to see and invest in both American and European technology ecosystems. We believe in strengthening all ecosystems - and this means that Europe, and I include Britain here, must build foundational technology infrastructure to keep up with the US. Without it, Europe will struggle to stand in the world as a credible and capable equal in a technologically defined era.

Sovereign infrastructure does not mean state-owned solutions. It means privately built, commercially viable systems that become so essential and embedded that they form the backbone of economic and strategic capability. Companies such as ASML and, potentially, Mistral and Helsing, illustrate what this can look like.

We see a few layers where this matters most, though this is by no means a comprehensive list - Space, Defence, and Foundational LLMs - all could have had a section in this letter. I’ve chosen to focus on Energy (the physical input layer), Manufacturing (the production layer), and Digital and Financial Infrastructure (the coordination and control layer).

Collectively, we call these technologies the ‘European Stack’. Having a ‘stack’ is not an argument for isolation or economic nationalism. The objective is not self-sufficiency, but to reduce asymmetric dependency in the foundational layers that confer leverage.

Energy has historically been viewed as a climate issue. It is, but it is also an industrial and security issue. In an AI-driven world, both Europe and the US need abundant, clean, flexible energy to deliver intelligence at scale. Fortunately, AI demand creates incentives to develop new forms of generation and to build flexibility across the system through storage and software. There is a significant economic opportunity to reimagine these systems from first principles as computing demand accelerates.

Within our portfolio, Sweden-based Flower is building a green energy baseload for European businesses through its vertically integrated platform - anchored in large-scale commercial storage. We are also watching earlier but potentially transformative efforts in nuclear fusion, such as Proxima, which speak to the long-term ambition Europe will ultimately need.

Energy is the foundational input of the intelligence age, and it must be viewed as such. Scaling proven technologies such as solar alongside emerging ones makes this achievable, necessary, and economically attractive.

Some of Europe’s greatest dependency risks are not immediately obvious. Compute, for instance, is a foundational primitive of modern society and of today’s GDP. If the internet were to go down, even briefly, a startling proportion of the European economy and public services would stall. European systems overwhelmingly run on US hyperscalers that answer, directly or indirectly, to the US government.

Giant portfolio company Evroc, also based in Sweden, is building a sovereign, sustainable cloud for Europe, designed specifically for regulated industries and critical workloads where control, resilience, and jurisdiction matter.

A similar dynamic is playing out in finance. The financial system has become a geopolitical tool, and the dollar remains the United States’ greatest source of leverage. The US is now using stablecoins to extend this dynamic by ensuring that the dollar serves as the underlying collateral. Stablecoins such as Tether and Circle are digital extensions of dollar dominance. They create persistent demand for dollar reserves and US Treasuries, reinforce the dollar as the default unit of account in digital markets, and extend US monetary influence directly into the settlement layer of the global economy. Stablecoins do not weaken the dollar. They strengthen it by embedding dollar dominance into the next generation of financial rails.

Europe should not fight stablecoins. Instead, it should encourage entrepreneurs to build credible, compliant, euro-denominated financial infrastructure that can operate at scale and interoperate globally. Money, like compute, is infrastructure and a coordination and control layer. Infrastructure captures value over decades and is difficult to displace once established.

Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, the US defence-tech company, has said, “If you don’t build it yourself, you don’t control it,”. This warning doesn’t apply just to defence, but rather to all technology. You risk losing technological edge if you don’t control production, and all nations need to safeguard the ability to make things.

Robotics, advanced manufacturing, materials science, and physical AI are reshaping how things are made. Design, simulation, and production are becoming one continuous feedback loop. Factories will operate like software systems: instrumented, adaptive, and constantly improving. The competitive advantage will not be cheaper labour. It will be a tighter integration between code and production.

Within our portfolio, Matta is strengthening the industrial layer with AI, starting in the UK. Cusp is applying AI to discover novel materials and enzymes critical to industrial processes worldwide, while Matta is modernising manufacturing workflows at the point of production. At Giant, we are also excited by companies such as Isembard and Humanoid, which represent the next generation of industrial tooling and robotics platforms in Europe.

Re-industrialisation is where Europe’s historical strengths can once again become advantages. It is often underappreciated that Europe, and Germany in particular, retain deep engineering and manufacturing DNA - from Bosch to BMW to Siemens. This DNA could be powerful if paired with startup-scale ambition, speed, and a willingness to evaluate its relationship with labour. That will require discomfort and change for Europe.

Resilience is the ability to thrive across multiple future states. In a world of contest, energy systems, industrial capacity, compute, and financial rails are instruments of power. Nations that own these layers will shape outcomes and retain agency. Nations that do not will operate within constraints set by others. The question, therefore, is not how many jobs we recreate, but whether Europe owns and participates in the systems that generate value.

Europe did not build the defining companies of the internet era. It cannot afford to miss the intelligence era. Sovereignty in the twenty-first century will be measured in ownership of the stack.

To the founders building it, we are open for business.