They said it couldn't be done
In the late 1960s, European aerospace was fragmented. France, Germany, the UK, Spain — each had their own companies, each too small to challenge Boeing's dominance. This is the "middle powers' dilemma" — too small to compete alone, too proud to surrender.
So they did something radical: they merged everything. Not a loose consortium. A real company with shared R&D, shared manufacturing, one mission. A coordinated public-private partnership that bootstrapped a product and focused relentlessly on market strategy.
The result? Airbus went from 0% to roughly 50% of the global commercial aircraft market.[3] Over 150,000 employees.[4] Deliveries and profitability far exceeding Boeing's.[5] A ~$160B enterprise.[6] As Tan, Jackson, Berjon & Coyle argue: the playbook exists.[7]
Four problems, one solution
Middle powers face four interlocking failures: scale (no single nation can match US compute), limited domestic markets (too small to sustain a frontier lab), foreign capture (ChatGPT drives ~80% of chatbot referral traffic globally;[1] Mistral's Le Chat doesn't register on tracking even in France[2]), and fragmented sovereignty (dozens of national AI strategies pulling in different directions).
But across Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK are extraordinary AI companies — private champions like Mistral and Cohere, public labs like BSC and RIKEN, and coalitions like New Nordics AI. Each world-class in a specific domain. (Note: ASML, a publicly traded global company, is an upstream dependency for all AI chip production, not a company that could be directly merged.)
What if they formed a Public AI Company? Not a loose consortium, but a real entity — with shared compute, shared R&D, and a market strategy. Assemble the entity below and find out.