Naturally, we all want this effort to succeed. However, even if many projects fail, directing this funding toward local providers is already a major improvement. Keeping capital investment within the local economy is far preferable to exporting it abroad where it ultimately strengthens the American tech ecosystem instead of our own.

Beyond the immediate economic impact, investment in training and retraining local talent is especially valuable. It helps develop skills not only for building new tools, but also for enabling local companies and institutions to understand emerging technologies and create their own training capabilities. This builds long term capacity rather than short term dependency.

As a result, it becomes far less unrealistic for local companies to invest in new technologies. They gain practical experience in adapting systems and training people to use new software services. This lowers both the perceived risk and the real cost of innovation.

Over the long term, this shift will also affect the salary dominance of Big Tech. Their exceptional margins are largely sustained by monopolistic control over key software services. If Europe, one of their largest markets, begins importing less while actively fostering local competition, that balance will change. A gradual but meaningful shift in power and pricing will follow. I am cautiously optimistic their arrogance will be their downfall. Let’s see.

A key issue is that the talent pool itself isn’t meaningfully better. Across every echelon of Big Tech, you’ll find plenty of people who couldn’t care less about the societal consequences of their work. They see themselves as neutral scientists and conveniently ignore the fact that they don’t work in academic labs. They work for multibillion-dollar corporations. These companies will push any breakthrough to market for competitive advantage, without a second thought for its broader social impact. Not to mention to questionable clients.

Ultimately, this situation isn’t driven by a lack of technical brilliance, but by the absence of strong American regulation and a failure to meaningfully rein in these companies. Quite frankly most of them should be broken up. That regulatory vacuum is what puts the rest of the world at risk.

Unfortunately, Europe has plenty of brains. But funding for aerospace projects is scarce in comparison to the US, both from a state as well as private perspective. All this will do is slow down the US, and not necessarily speed up Europe.