2026-05-16 03:31:34
On May 8 and 9, so-called Immortal Regiment marches were staged across dozens of countries, with crowds carrying portraits of Russian relatives who died in World War II. The significance is far greater than mere commemoration; however, the Kremlin-aided parades represent a key regime propaganda event.
Started as a grassroots initiative by three journalists in the Siberian city of Tomsk in 2012, the march spread rapidly. By 2015, it had reached 100 Russian cities and 15 countries, and President Vladimir Putin joined the Moscow procession carrying a portrait of his grandfather.
By 2025, when the world marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Kremlin had fully appropriated the Immortal Regiment, transforming what had once been a civil ritual.
The Victory Day cult, the central nation-building narrative of Putin’s Russia, portrays the Soviet Union as the principal liberator of Europe from Nazism, and enshrines the sacrifice of the Soviet people as a defining national experience. By 2025, the Immortal Regiment movement had evolved into pobedobesie, or victory mania, in its most aggressive and jingoistic form.
For many Russians, the war in Ukraine, now grinding into its fifth year, has become inseparable from that narrative. Casualties mount, propaganda plays on, and the two have fused in the public imagination into a single story of a people both martyred and triumphant.
The faces of soldiers who stormed Nazi positions have been joined in the march by portraits of men killed in what the Kremlin calls its special military operation in Ukraine and in the campaigns of the Wagner Group. The orange-and-black St. George ribbon, for generations a symbol of wartime sacrifice, now appears alongside the Z and V insignia of the Ukraine invasion and the flags of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
In Moscow, however, the Immortal Regiment has moved online for the second year running. The 2026 Victory Day parade was scaled back significantly as well, with no military hardware on display and the persistent threat of Ukrainian drone attacks hanging over the capital. Elsewhere across Russia’s regions, the Regiment took many forms: participants marched through city streets, floated down the Moika and Irtysh rivers, drove in convoy through Omsk, and took to the skies on helicopters in Magadan. The biggest turnout was in St. Petersburg, where roughly one million people joined the march.
Beyond Russia’s borders, the picture grows considerably more complex. The march has gone truly global, drawing participants across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia, as well as in many European countries and a number of post-Soviet states where it has been officially banned or restricted. This year’s Victory Day celebrations saw those restrictions openly defied in some countries, including Belarus, Moldova, and Germany.
France has charted a different course entirely. The country has not only refrained from restricting Soviet military and Russian symbols on such occasions, but has also issued permits for Immortal Regiment processions. In recent years, those marches have become something more contentious: part confrontation between pro-Kremlin diaspora groups and Ukrainian activists, part political stage for French radical organizations.
In 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Paris prefecture approved not one but two Immortal Regiment marches, both departing from the same location and following the same route, two hours apart. Many regular participants were visibly confused, unsure which procession was which.
To the average Parisian, the two were barely distinguishable: both featured a similar array of flags — Soviet, Russian, the flag of the French Resistance, Kazakh, and Belarusian — and both moved to the standard soundtrack of Soviet wartime songs.
Why the Kremlin would open its most sacred commemorative ritual to French fringe radicals is not immediately obvious. The broader pattern, however, is familiar.
Moscow has a well-documented record of cultivating ties with French radical movements, from the Les Gilets Jaunes to Marine Le Pen’s Le Rassemblement National, along with fellow travelers such as Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of Charles de Gaulle and a guest at the 2025 Moscow Victory Day parade.
The ambitions of French radical groups are equally transparent: with the 2027 presidential election on the horizon and Marine Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella leading the polls, courting the Russian-speaking electorate has become an attractive political calculation. Germany’s AfD, which has long targeted Russian-speaking voters in its campaigns, offers a ready precedent.
For the Kremlin, however, the gamble carries risks. Rather than consolidating the Russian-speaking diaspora, the strategy has fractured a community that had previously been willing to align with Russia’s state institutions in France.
The French laissez-faire approach may well prove to be one of the possible scenarios for the natural defragmentation of the part of the Kremlin-aligned, Russian-speaking diaspora in Europe. Outright bans may not be effective: The desire to march often lies in something simpler than political allegiance: the inability to articulate memory in any language other than the Soviet victory narrative.
In such cases, local authorities might do well to consider deploying their own soft power — crafting a new commemorative narrative around World War II, that is adjusted to national history and memory, yet expansive enough not to exclude local Russian speakers.
Some in Estonia have already called for precisely this kind of moderately integrationist approach. At least part of the French Russian-speaking community that commemorates its relatives through the Immortal Regiment appears, for its part, to be finding this path on its own.
Dr. Alexandra Yatsyk is a CEPA Russia Future Fellow, a researcher at the University of Lille, and an Adjunct Professor at Sciences Po, France. Her expertise covers identity-making in Eastern Europe and Russia, biopolitics, illiberalism, and memory. She served as a researcher in Europe and USA, including the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Polish Academy of Sciences, Uppsala Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw, Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, and others. She is the author of the “Biopolitics and Illiberalism: A Critical Approach to Putin’s Russia”, “Mnemonic security and post-Soviet aphasia: Soviet monuments in Estonian media after Russian invasion of Ukraine”, “Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: From Populations to Nations”, and others.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-05-15 18:51:55
After the fall of the USSR in 1991, some Western and former Soviet leaders wanted Russia to join NATO. Thirty-five years later, such dreams have turned to mutual hostility.
Vladimir Putin’s often contradictory impulses toward the West echo sentiments and actions that go back more than a millennium. Their complexity makes it difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate what can or should happen next.
If US President Bill Clinton’s policies toward Russia seemed to swing between soft and hard, part of the explanation may be that Strobe Talbott, the president’s main adviser on Russia, wrote his senior thesis at Yale on the controversial Russian diplomat-poet Fedor Tiutchev (1803-1863), considered his country’s third greatest lyric poet after Pushkin and Lermontov.
Noted for his strong and often changing views on Russia and the West, Tiutchev expressed a warning that remains valid in 2026 (using Roger Conant’s translation):
“Who would grasp Russia with the mind?
For her no yardstick was created:
Her soul is of a special kind,
By faith alone appreciated.”
In his twenties, Tiutchev held the West in high esteem, but later took the opposite view. He chided his colleagues for the naivety of their hope the West might someday respect Russia.
Yet if an observer tallied what Russia has received from the West over the centuries, the list is impressive.
For a start, there is a debt to the Scandinavians who developed Novgorod and Kiev; then to the First Bulgarian Empire and its Preslav Literary School for the Cyrillic alphabet; to the Teutonic crusaders who pressured Pskov and other Russian city-states to cooperate against an external threat; and to Dutch shipbuilders and German scholars who helped Tsar Peter I modernize his country.
Voltaire and other Europeans brought Catherine I into the Enlightenment; Europeans worked with Russia to defeat Napoleon and stabilize the continent; US presidents mediated an end to Russia’s disastrous war with Japan; allied with Kerensky’s Provisional Government against the Kaiser; helped Stalin defeat Hitler; kept the Cold War cold; and, after the Soviet collapse, tried to create a partnership with post-Communist Russia.
For Vladimir Putin, Russia is a Third Rome — more pure than the corrupted first Rome and the Byzantine second Rome, which fell to Islam in 1453.
Russian civilization, according to Putin, is based on Orthodox Christianity but integrates the faiths of the many non-Russian communities under Mother Russia’s umbrella. Putin sees Russia not merely as a nation-state but as a distinct “civilization-state,” a unique, sovereign, and self-sufficient entity blending elements of the Tsarist and Soviet empires.
To him, this “Russian World” is superior to degenerate Western liberalism. It includes a shared spiritual and cultural space with Belarus and Ukraine, the latter of which he regards as a “tool” created by external forces rather than a real state.
Putin’s often contradictory assertions mirror those of Tiutchev, who lived, loved, and sometimes worked in Europe for more than two decades. He thrived in the literary salons of Munich as Bavaria’s King Ludwig I sought to make his capital the “Athens of Germany.”
Tiutchev spoke French most of the time, even with his two wives, but wrote poetry in gorgeous Russian that included old Slavic phrases.
For Tiutchev, Europe was civilization. He saw his native land as bleak, occupied by untutored peasants, and a place where everything was dependent on rank and the brutal corporal punishment of the knout.
Yet Tiutchev still endorsed the spiritual values of Russia, with its Orthodox faith.
And he publicly defended his motherland against a withering portrait of a slave society painted by the Marquis de Custine. While in private he agreed with the Marquis, he planted pro-Russian propaganda in European media.
Notwithstanding his reputation as a bon vivant, Tiutchev actively defended the image of Imperial Russia and criticized Europe’s decadent lifestyle. But when he returned to Russia and his family estate, he felt out of place and was dismayed that the peasantry had no culture and the nobility focused on power and privilege without the refined ways of Europe,
Tiutchev was both a Slavophile, dedicated to the unique traditions of Mother Russia, and a Pan-Slavist, who sought to unite all Slavic peoples under Russian leadership. Slavophilism was primarily cultural and domestic, while Pan-Slavism was geared toward international politics and expansion.
Putin’s doctrine of Russian civilization recalls the Slavophile devotion to Russian values, while his foreign ambitions resemble Pan-Slavism, except that his ambition extends into Western Europe.
For centuries, Tiutchev wrote, Western Europe did not understand that there was another Europe — Eastern Europe. It was a legitimate sister of the West and a more sincerely Christian world, cohesive in its component parts and living its own individual life.
This Europe had been shrouded in chaos but finally, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the hand of a giant “sundered this shroud and the Europe of Charlemagne found itself face to face with the Europe of Peter the Great,” he wrote.
Putin often references Peter and fancies himself as his heir. Tiutchev is a valuable guide to his thinking.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security, Foreword by Jack F. Matlock (2001); Baltic Independence and Russian Empire (1991); and Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence (1990 and 2011).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-05-15 18:40:00
Albanian Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku and other senior officials have been charged with corruption, leaving the country split on how best to tackle a culture of bribes and backhanders. With European Union (EU) accession hanging in the balance, this presents Europe with an opportunity to apply pressure.
Balluku, who was minister of Infrastructure and Energy, was accused of improperly favoring a company to build a tunnel in the south of the country. Investigators later found evidence that it was not the first tender affected by her alleged favoritism. She denies the charges.
While she was fired from the government, Prime Minister Edi Rama’s ruling party refused to lift her parliamentary immunity in March, sparking widespread anger. Balluku is regarded as Rama’s closest ally, raising questions about the prime minister’s own knowledge about the mismanagement of contracts.
Balluku’s case was the latest in a series of corruption allegations surrounding Rama and his government. The prime minister, whose Socialist Party won its fourth consecutive election in May 2025, has been accused of ties to organized crime, while some Socialist deputies and mayors have been prosecuted for abuse of office, money laundering, and tender manipulation.
There have been protests in parliament and demonstrations in the streets. In December, lawmakers from the opposition Democratic Party threw flares and clashed with police during a parliamentary session.
In February, mass protests erupted in Tirana and turned violent when rocks and Molotov cocktails were thrown at government offices before riot police used tear gas and water cannon to subdue the crowd. Regular demonstrations organized by the opposition Democratic Party are continuing and becoming increasingly violent.
Despite the emotional intensity on the streets of the capital and the continued escalation of public anger, the protests are unlikely to bring down Rama’s government and lead to reform. The Socialists hold 83 of the 140 seats in parliament, and the prime minister has a tight grip on power.
His government has successfully attracted investment in Albania’s tourism sector, maintaining public optimism about the country’s economic prospects and shoring up his position. In August 2025, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were given approval for a $1.4bn luxury real estate development, which brought Rama the bonus of stronger ties with the US first family.
Previous unrest led Rama to support the creation of a Special Anti-Corruption and Organized Crime Structure (SPAK) in 2019, and he has since criticized and praised the anti-corruption body. This appears to have satisfied many in the country, though a minority still speaks out against SPAK’s inefficiencies.
Former Albanian Prime Minister and current Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha, who has appeared at protests, is dogged by his own corruption scandals, leading to the suspicion that a change of government would not solve the problem.
Given the public distrust of all leaders and parties, Rama has no political imperative to make significant changes.
The government has offered gestures against corruption. In September, a month before the indictment was filed against Balluku, Rama unveiled Diella, an AI-generated “minister” which he said would ensure “public tenders will be 100% free of corruption.” The announcement was dismissed by opposition lawmakers as a publicity stunt that would do nothing to raise Albania from its 91st place in Transparency International’s global corruption perceptions index.
The failure of Albania’s political class to address widespread graft means Europe may be its best hope.
Tirana has worked for European Union membership since 2009, and accession talks began in 2020, but concerns about democratic backsliding and corruption meant the process stalled.
A 2020 poll showed 97% of Albanians support EU accession, and Rama has promised it by 2030, giving Brussels an opportunity. The EU can and should leverage Albania’s future membership to spur reform.
The European Parliament has repeatedly urged Albania to deepen and implement anti-corruption efforts, but it has not outlined specific steps the country needs to take to meet EU requirements, nor has it guaranteed accession. These steps could invigorate the population and help drive genuine reform.
By actively engaging with the Albanian government and population, the EU could build on Albanians’ near-unanimous support for accession to help develop a system that will help prevent corruption, inspire confidence, and stop future backsliding.
If Rama is to deliver on his promise of EU membership by 2030, something will have to change. Brussels can provide a blueprint for Albania to follow.
David J. Kostelancik is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He was a career member of the US Senior Foreign Service, holding the rank of Minister Counselor, and served as a deputy coordinator for terrorism prevention and detention in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. He was foreign policy adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Hungary and in two postings to Russia.
Andrew Raynus is a Communications Intern at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a third-year undergraduate student at The George Washington University, studying International Affairs and International Business with a concentration in International Development.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-05-15 01:21:55
Quantum computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics — such as superposition and entanglement — to solve complex problems far beyond the capacity of classical supercomputers.
The US quantum model raises horses that break fast out of the starting gate. Driven by the private sector, it funds multiple hardware architectures, applies rigorous “prove-it” performance standards, and accelerates the fastest survivors toward commercialization and national security readiness.
The European quantum model emphasizes endurance. It embeds quantum systems in government-run supercomputing networks and builds continent-spanning quantum communications infrastructure.
This quantum horse race is underway. Quantum sensing runs GPS-denied navigation. Quantum communications protect government and defense networks. Quantum optimization powers logistics and energy systems. American and European jockeys are racing seven different quantum technologies — and any could emerge victorious.
1. Superconducting Qubits: The Industrial Front-Runner
Superconducting qubits are already commercially available, backed by IBM, Google, and others. They operate at near-absolute-zero temperatures and enable rapid iteration cycles. The tradeoff is fragility: superconducting qubits are sensitive to noise and hard to scale without dramatic increases in error rates.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, launched in 2024, applies a “prove it” standard: any architecture, including superconducting systems, must demonstrate credible progress toward utility-scale performance by 2033 or lose the label of serious contender.
Europe’s EuroHPC embeds superconducting into national supercomputing infrastructure, most visibly through Germany’s procurement of an IQM quantum system. The goal is not to win a qubit-count competition, but to make quantum computing a practical tool within existing high-performance computing.
2. Trapped Ions: Precision and Reliability
Trapped-ion systems are precision athletes. Their qubits are highly stable, with lower error rates than most competing approaches. Still, they operate slowly, making them better suited to deep, high-accuracy computations than to high-throughput tasks. US companies such as IonQ and Quantinuum have demonstrated real progress.
The US and Europe are taking fundamentally different approaches to trapped ion development. Washington evaluates trapped-ion systems on the same benchmarks as every other qubit architecture — no special treatment. Europe, by contrast, is explicitly funding the path from research to manufacturable product, betting that trapped ions’ accuracy advantage makes them the right technology for high-value defense applications like cryptography and optimization.
3. Neutral Atoms: The Scalable Challenger
Neutral-atom systems trap and manipulate individual atoms using laser arrays, offering a compelling middle path that is more scalable than trapped ions and more controllable than superconducting qubits. Companies such as QuEra in the US and Pasqal in France have emerged as credible players. Although the technology is young, recent demonstrations of large-scale entanglement and programmable arrays have drawn serious attention.
4. Photonics: The Network-Native Pathway
Photonic quantum computing uses particles of light as qubits. It operates at room temperature, integrates with fiber-optic telecommunications infrastructure, and aligns with quantum networking and secure communications. The tradeoff is deep technical challenges that limit early use.
Europe has made its clearest quantum hardware bet in photonics. The European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI) is building a continent-spanning photonic quantum communications network. If it succeeds, Europe will win a durable comparative advantage in quantum-secured communications.
The US has invested in photonic quantum networking research but hasn’t pursued a national communications backbone. American efforts focus on developing quantum-secured military and intelligence communications rather than building civilian infrastructure.
5. Silicon Spin Qubits: The Semiconductor Leverage Play
Silicon spin qubits take a different approach to quantum computing. Rather than building entirely new hardware from scratch, they attempt to leverage the same manufacturing processes and materials already used to make conventional computer chips. The appeal is straightforward: if quantum processors can be built on existing semiconductor production lines, they could eventually be manufactured at massive scale and at far lower cost than competing approaches. Intel is the most prominent US investor betting on this pathway.
Progress has been slow. The US benefits from a large semiconductor industrial base and a venture capital ecosystem that can sustain parallel bets. Europe has made clear that it wants to keep any quantum manufacturing breakthroughs on home soil. ASML, the Dutch company that produces the lithography machines underpinning global chip manufacturing, is the most strategically positioned European player. Whether European manufacturers can match the scale of US semiconductor investment remains an open question.
6. Topological Qubits: The Moonshot
Topological quantum computing seeks to engineer qubits that are inherently resistant to errors by encoding quantum information in exotic physical states, rather than by deploying large amounts of additional computing power to constantly detect and fix mistakes. If it works, the payoff could be transformative: far fewer physical qubits than competing architectures would be needed to perform the same useful computations. If it fails, topological qubits will remain a scientific curiosity.
The US has historically been the natural home for this kind of high-risk, long-horizon research, with Microsoft’s topological qubit program the most prominent example. But Europe is not sitting it out. The EU’s Quantum Flagship program has funded foundational research into topological approaches at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, showcasing that the countries that lead in foundational science today may set the terms of the field tomorrow.
7. Special-Purpose Systems: The Near-Term Specialist
Quantum annealers are purpose-built for narrow tasks and logistics such as portfolio optimization, materials simulation, and energy grid management. American company D-Wave is the leading commercial player.
For policymakers, this pathway has immediate relevance. Neither the US nor Europe has deployed quantum systems at scale for operational use — these remain largely experimental. But both are actively working to identify where quantum hardware can deliver a practical edge today, even in limited form. The US is pushing vendors to demonstrate measurable results in real applications, not just laboratory benchmarks. Europe is taking a different route, physically co-locating quantum systems alongside conventional supercomputers, betting that embedding the two technologies together will surface useful applications faster, particularly in industrial and logistics sectors where European companies already have commercial depth.
Benchmarking Versus Backbone
The US strategy benchmarks capability and lets markets determine deployment. Europe builds infrastructure and lets procurement create demand. Neither approach is superior, but the results could diverge over time. The US model rewards speed and competition, favoring companies that can demonstrate results quickly, but risks leaving workforce development and standards-setting to chance. The European model moves deliberately, using public procurement to anchor industrial capacity at home and shape the emerging governance frameworks that will define the field globally. Who sets those rules matters as much as who builds the best hardware.
The winner will not have the highest qubit count. It will be the country or coalition that first translates quantum capabilities into narrow, operational deployments and uses them to lock in infrastructure, standards, and supply chains.
The winning strategy is not to wait for a universal quantum computer. It is to move first on specific applications where quantum effects already outperform classical systems. The horse that reaches practical deployment first, not the one with the most impressive specifications, will win.
Alicia Chavy is a Vice President at Beacon Global Strategies, a National Security Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a Board Member of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum. She specializes in national security, emerging technology policy, and geopolitical risk, with a particular focus on AI, quantum innovation, and emerging tech adoption. She holds a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
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2026-05-15 00:43:54
It sounds like the famous Cole Porter song “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love.” Google does it. Amazon does it. Microsoft does it. Like Porter’s birds, bees, and “educated fleas,” AI cloud producers are falling in love with designing new semiconductors to help power their data centers.
Their goal is clear: to reduce dependence on NVIDIA, which has become the world’s most valuable company by producing the semiconductors that power AI’s creation of images, videos, and 3D graphics. Yet when headlines shout about how Google’s new Tensor chips or Amazon’s custom silicon represent a “shot at NVIDIA,” they miss the mark. A close look reveals that these in-house chips will complement, not replace, the world’s most powerful semiconductor company.
AI computing depends on orchestrating a wide variety of chips. The cloud companies are adding their own general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) on top of NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs). As AI develops, that hybrid model will deepen. The cloud companies will co‑own parts of the AI layer, while NVIDIA continues to build the central engines, at least for the foreseeable future.
The lucrative GPU market is booming, estimated to grow from around $36 billion this year to a staggering $811 billion in 2035. NVIDIA holds well over 80% of that market, and its data center revenue is projected to rise from roughly $115 billion in 2025 to around $483 billion by 2030, even after factoring in growing use of complementary cloud provider chips. The only serious GPU competitor is AMD, another American company.
The cloud companies aim to lower costs and gain leverage, not to replace NVIDIA. Google is the clearest example. Its latest TPU 8t and 8i chips run Google’s own models and select partners’ workloads efficiently on Google Cloud; they are integrated with Google’s software stack and priced to undercut some NVIDIA chips, especially for inference. With TPU 8t/8i, Google gains a powerful cost‑control and bargaining tool and reduces its dependence on NVIDIA at the margin. But NVIDIA chips, enveloped in a proprietary software suite called CUDA, remain unavoidable.
Amazon Web Services is building perhaps the most complete custom chip portfolio. Its Arm-based Graviton CPUs do general compute, its Trainium trains AI models, and its Inferentia specializes in inference, using a trained model to make predictions, decisions, or generate outputs based on new, unseen data. Amazon designs these chips in‑house, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) manufactures them. AWS’s own materials stress that these chips complement, not replace, NVIDIA: they are offered alongside NVIDIA GPUs, and AWS explicitly presents custom silicon as a way to “push our custom silicon edge” while continuing partnerships with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
Microsoft follows a similar pattern. Its Maia AI Accelerator and Arm-based Azure Cobalt CPU were developed to optimize the company’s Azure internal and customer AI workloads, using a “systems approach” that tailors everything from silicon to service. Microsoft is explicit that Maia “is not powerful enough to replace GPUs from NVIDIA for the purposes of developing large language models.” Instead, Maia chips are designed for inference and efficiency of specific high-volume tasks, not the full spectrum of AI workloads, reducing but not eliminating Microsoft’s need for NVIDIA and AMD accelerators.
GPUs will remain central for large‑scale parallel computation, while CPUs and “agent‑style” accelerators orchestrate and plan workflows. AI data centers count one CPU for every four GPUs; that ratio will move toward parity in the coming decades, according to a TrendForce analysis. Demand for CPUs and other AI chips will rise, but without a decline in the absolute number of GPUs deployed.
Although headlines may claim that Google is “taking a shot at NVIDIA,” the underlying reality is that the AI chip market is becoming layered and collaborative, with custom silicon acting as cost and bargaining levers that coexist with, rather than replace, NVIDIA’s dominant GPUs. AI chips of various colors and shapes will need to be mixed and matched to achieve optimal outcomes.
Christopher Cytera CEng MIET is a senior fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a technology business executive with over 30 years’ experience in semiconductors, electronics, communications, video, and imaging.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
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2026-05-14 03:13:41
A busy commercial airport cancels all flights twice in quick succession. The trigger? Small, remote-controlled, low-flying objects. Safety concerns over drone activity and the defensive measures in place to deal with drones caused chaos this year at El Paso’s international airport.
Cheap, expendable drones also dominate modern battlefields. They have allowed Ukraine to battle much-larger Russia into a stalemate. Iran has used them to bloody the US and close the critical Straits of Hormuz.
How to benefit from and cope with the drone revolution represents a major security opportunity — and challenge. Existing measures are insufficient. Chinese components flood Western markets and scoop up data. Regulatory approaches to date have focused on imposing bans against Chinese products. They fail to deal with the existing drone fleet or to construct viable alternatives.
This must change. In a series of articles leading up to the NATO Summit in July, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) will explore the broad implications of the drone revolution. CEPA will describe the challenge and offer recommendations for practical solutions, drawing on expertise from the technology and defense communities.
CEPA is well positioned to lead drone research. Its offices in both Washington and Brussels prioritize transatlantic defense and security. Series contributors will be drawn from CEPA’s Tech Policy and Transatlantic Defense and Security programs, to include military strategists and technology policy thought leaders with decades of US, European, and NATO experience.
Defense against drones is complicated. Anti-drone measures, such as signal jamming, tend to be all or nothing, impacting all devices in range — dangerous and innocent. Other defense tactics, such as shooting laser beams, are still being perfected, and conventional missile air defense measures are expensive. Deployment of these defenses can do more damage than any drone disruption. Solutions must balance the security concerns with the widespread, safe deployment of drones to boost a wide variety of fields, from agriculture to law enforcement.
The El Paso closures illustrated many of the challenges in combatting the drone security problem. Drones hovered near the US Air Force base, potentially recording and transmitting images to China or elsewhere, raising national security questions. But the US Customs and Border Protection operated the drone in the first place. Almost anyone can buy a drone and put it to use with little or no traceability. Drones fly over borders. Meeting the drone challenge represents an international problem that will require an international solution.
Start with identification. No comprehensive database of drone operators exists. Mexican cartels deploy drones for drug trafficking, crisscrossing the border near El Paso. US customs authorities respond by deploying their own drones. The devices came too close to the US Air Force base for comfort, and the presence of the drones triggered indiscriminate anti-drone measures at the nearby airport.
Drones can pose dramatic dangers. The Kremlin used a wide array of them to shut down airports across Europe in its shadow war against NATO allies. No universal, reliable means exist to identify and track drones in the US or anywhere else. There is no Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) or International Civil Aviation Organization equivalent for small devices. Users are not required to have a license, so there is no means to identify drone operators.
Device security is next. Drones do not need to be operated by criminals to be a threat. The details of the devices seen in El Paso have not been shared, but over 85% of all drones in use in the US were made in China and it is certain that some of the component parts and the software running on the El Paso devices were of Chinese origin. This matters, as the data gathered and obtained by any devices — like say, video footage of a US Air Force base — could conceivably be sent directly to China by default, without the knowledge or consent of the user. Or more worryingly, devices could be commandeered and weaponized from afar.
The Federal Communications Commission has banned all foreign-made drones and drone components, with a few temporary exceptions. But the ban does not address the hundreds of thousands of Chinese drones in active use throughout the US today — or western dependence on Chinese components for drone production. The “rip and replace” approach used to remove Chinese equipment from telecoms networks is not a practical option, so what is the rearguard action to secure the existing drone fleet?
Along with the US, both the EU and NATO are attempting to create and enforce standards on drone procurement, use, parts, and sourcing. It’s a perilous task. China dominates supply to such an extent that it will be difficult to change without provoking Chinese retaliation. The EU’s Action Plan on Drone and Counter Drone Security includes ambitious goals to develop Europe’s capacity to build drones alongside security objectives, such as requirements for operator identification and a “traffic management system” for drones to facilitate safe usage. NATO’s plans focus more on procurement and innovation, and some NATO members have already banded together to boost manufacturing efforts.
Although bans might help, they are no silver bullet. During the 1940s, the US and its allies led the way with the Chicago Convention, allowing commercial aviation to grow and flourish to this day. Such leadership is required again to put rules around drones that allow them to benefit both civilians and defense industries — while mitigating their dangers.
Ronan Murphy is Director of the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Catherine Sendak is the Director of the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). From 2018 to 2021, she was the Principal Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Sendak also spent over a dozen years on Capitol Hill on both the House and Senate Committees on Armed Services.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
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