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 50% of the global commercial aircraft market. 130,000 employees. Revenue exceeding Boeing's. A $100B+ enterprise. As Tan, Jackson, Berjon & Coyle argue: the playbook exists.
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 holds 79.8% of consumer chatbots globally; Mistral's Le Chat has <4% even in France), and fragmented sovereignty (dozens of national AI strategies pulling in different directions).
But across Canada, France, Germany, Japan, 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.
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 Megazord below and find out.