Brussels Economic Forum 2026: 26th Edition Focuses on the EU’s Strategic Role in the Global AI Race
The Brussels Economic Forum (BEF), the European Commission’s annual flagship economic event, runs during the week of 4-9 May 2026 in its 26th edition. For more than 25 years, the BEF has brought together political leaders, business representatives, civil society, academics, and key economic actors to engage in forward-looking discussions on the issues shaping the European economy. The 2026 theme is unmistakable: just as the industrial revolution transformed the 19th century, the AI revolution is reshaping our economic landscape in profound and lasting ways.
The strategic question
The 2026 BEF focuses explicitly on the EU’s strategic role and its ambitions in the global AI race. The framing matters. For most of 2024 and 2025, European AI policy debates were defined by the AI Act — the regulatory architecture for governing risk. In 2026, the conversation has shifted to industrial strategy: how does Europe build the capital base, the talent pipeline, the data infrastructure and the compute capacity to compete with American hyperscalers and Chinese national champions? The BEF is the year’s most visible setting for that conversation.
The competitive landscape
The competitive backdrop is sobering for European industry. The largest US AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft — have raised cumulative capital exceeding $300 billion over the last three years. Chinese national champions — particularly Alibaba’s Qwen, ByteDance’s Doubao, and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence’s Zhipu — operate within a state-coordinated industrial policy framework. European AI champions — Mistral, Aleph Alpha, DeepL, and a handful of vertical specialists — operate at one or two orders of magnitude smaller scale. The 2026 BEF will examine what European industrial policy needs to deliver.
The Letta-Draghi prescription
The diagnostic frame for the 2026 BEF draws heavily on the Letta and Draghi reports of 2024. Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness identified the AI investment gap as one of three central productivity challenges, alongside energy costs and labour market segmentation. The prescriptions — sustained large-scale European compute investment, regulatory simplification, single capital market — are now being implemented variously through the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP), the Innovation Fund, and the savings and investment union architecture under the Cyprus Presidency.
The voices to watch
The BEF’s value lies in its participant list. Confirmed speakers for 2026 include the Commission’s Executive Vice-Presidents, the Presidents of the European Parliament and the European Investment Bank, the heads of the major European industrial associations including BusinessEurope and the European Round Table for Industry, and the CEOs of leading European industrial AI users — Siemens, ASML, SAP, Schneider Electric. The civil society dimension is anchored by the European Trade Union Confederation and the European AI Safety Forum.
What 2026 should deliver
For European industry, the BEF is judged on three measurables: the capital commitments visible in the room (typically a mix of EIB, public-private partnerships, and corporate matching investment), the policy signals on energy and infrastructure (the AccelerateEU communication of 22 April 2026 sets the frame), and the connectivity it builds between European AI start-ups and the deep-pocketed industrial users they need as customers. The BEF does not produce conclusions. Its value is in the conversations it enables — and in 2026, the conversation is whether Europe can yet build the AI industrial base it now openly says it needs.
