Statement by President von der Leyen at the joint press conference with President Costa following the informal meeting of the European Council of November 2026

First of all, I also want to thank you dear Taoiseach, dear Micheál for the fantastic hospitality and the fantastic atmosphere in which we spent the last two days.

We have just wrapped up two intense days here in Dublin. Let me start with AI, we had a good discussion with Arthur Mensch and Geoffrey Hinton about its enormous opportunities, but also about its risks. Every generation faces a technological turning point that shapes the decades ahead. For ours, it is artificial intelligence. And Europe must get it right.

I will start with our strengths. Europe has real advantages: We have world-leading industries; a long-standing manufacturing tradition; deep scientific expertise; and vast amounts of valuable industrial data. These data are precious. But we still need to turn these strengths into global leadership, and I want to highlight three points: the adoption of AI at speed and scale, the capacity and sovereignty in our AI Tech Stack, and clear rules to build trust.

First, on adoption. Interestingly, Europe leads in AI adoption. In 2025, 37% of EU businesses used AI on average in the EU. Looking at specific Member States, Finland is outstanding, with 66%of businesses using AI already - almost double than the US. We want to continue this trend and accelerate the use of AI - move AI from the screen to the real world. That is why, earlier this year, I appointed Jim Snabe as Special Envoy for Industrial Artificial Intelligence. We are focusing work on five sectors where AI can have the biggest value and impact. In each sector, we will deliver a vision coupled with concrete actions. The first part of this work will come out in two weeks.

Now to my second point, computing power and cloud. Here, Europe needs massive computing power. Over the last years, we have successfully built supercomputing capabilities, you are familiar with them. We have opened them to our researchers and start-ups through our 19 AI factories across Europe, and now we are expanding it to AI Gigafactories. Seven Gigafactories are in the planning, and we are mobilising around €30 billion for those seven AI gigafactories. They will provide the computing capacities our startups need to build the most advanced AI models. More computing capacity will also be key for Europe to play a role in the development of frontier models, frontier AI.

This brings me to my third point in our agenda for tech sovereignty. All of this requires massive investments. At least €500 billion according to our own estimates. We have done very well in creating a vibrant start-up ecosystem. Europe is creating more tech start-ups than the US, but many of these start-ups fail to receive the necessary support to scale. That is why we have created the Scaleup Europe fund which has been a great success from the outset. What is missing now are the large investments in chips, compute and frontier AI. Therefore, we need to complete our Savings and Investment Union, and attract private investment. And of course, our next European budget must also reflect this ambition. Today, we saw a shared will to put forward ideas for funding for Tech sovereignty financing. I will follow up with an ambitious proposal.

Finally, we discussed Ukraine. Since day one of Russia's war of aggression, we have been by Ukraine's side – financially, militarily and with humanitarian support. And we will be there the day after. I very much welcome the renewed momentum to move things forward toward a just and lasting peace. A strong European presence is important to defend Ukraine's interests and European interests. I welcome the European team - E5 plus the two institutions, Council and Commission. We will support Ukraine and safeguard our interests. As we move toward multilateral discussions with the US, Ukraine and Russia our focus needs to be on ending the war and achieving peace for Ukraine. With Ukraine and our partners, we need to concentrate on our work on various strands. This includes robust and legally binding security guarantees and a post-war prosperity package. Here, for the post-war prosperity package, we are not starting from scratch. We have been working with our partners for many months.

Finally: The best way to get Russia to the table is to keep up our support for Ukraine. And to keep maximum pressure on Russia. This is why we will soon propose our 22^nd package of sanctions –And before the next European Council, the Commission will put forward a proposal to close the gap in Ukraine's finances for 2027.

Let me be clear, the path to peace will not be easy. But we will remain united as we have been in the last five years in our support for Ukraine. And with the end goal clear in our minds.

Thank you, very much again dear Taoiseach for the hospitality, it was a pleasure to be here.