The European Commission has announced the launch of a new initiative, InvestAI, aimed at mobilizing €200 billion in investments in artificial intelligence. However, in the global AI arms race, this remains relatively modest. Polish technology companies also tend to rely on infrastructure developed by Western leaders. The greatest challenge for Polish firms is to foster innovation locally. “Investing in artificial intelligence and quantum cryptography is an investment in national security,” argues Dr. Maciej Kawecki, president of the Lem Institute.
“Poland has joined the ranks of the world’s 20 strongest economies without developing artificial intelligence. We can only imagine what would happen if we found ourselves even in the middle of this race because today we are definitely at the very end, and AI development is a key pillar,” Dr. Maciej Kawecki, president of the Lem Institute and director of the Innovation Center at WSB Merito University in Warsaw, stated in an interview with Newseria.
Poland is close to joining the world’s top 20 economies. According to forecasts from the International Monetary Fund, the country is expected to reach a GDP of $915 billion this year, placing it among the global leaders. By 2027, Poland is projected to surpass the $1 trillion mark, gradually closing the gap with the largest economies. However, much of this progress has been driven by Poland’s accession to the EU and related financial support rather than domestic innovations.
“Among the 1,200 companies classified as unicorns, meaning those valued at over $1 billion, there is not a single Polish company. Meanwhile, there are unicorns from Estonia and Finland. ElevenLabs, a company using generative AI for voice processing and valued at several billion dollars, was classified as an American company, even though it was founded by two Poles, because it developed in the U.S. We need to utilize EU funds so that at least one Polish company makes it onto that list in the coming years,” Dr. Maciej Kawecki assessed.
The report “AI-Driven Leaders in the CEE Region,” prepared jointly by MCI Capital, Bain & Company, and Art of Networking, indicates that AI is becoming a major investment area in the U.S. and worldwide, including Poland. In recent years, nearly one-third of global venture capital investments have been directed toward artificial intelligence. Technologically, Europe has already been surpassed by the United States and China.
“Many Polish startups use APIs and leverage the openness of solutions like OpenAI to create their own products. While technically feasible, there is a risk that such companies could eventually be cut off from these resources. Any situation where we do not train our own AI models and depend on external products creates a form of dependency. Today, the most powerful AI tools are not being developed in Poland or the EU,” the expert emphasized.
In February 2025, the European Commission announced the launch of the InvestAI initiative, which aims to mobilize €200 billion in AI investments, including the creation of a new EU fund of €20 billion for four AI gigafactories. These AI megafactories will specialize in training the most complex, large-scale AI models. They are expected to house approximately 100,000 next-generation AI processors, nearly four times more than currently planned AI factories. Ultimately, every company, not just the largest players, should have access to large-scale computing power.
In the AI “arms race,” Europe lags behind the U.S. and China. The Bank of China plans to allocate $130 billion for AI development over the next five years, while the U.S. has announced that the Stargate project will receive $500 billion.
“The European Union does not have equivalents of NVIDIA, Meta, or Google, because we never built a culture of creating such tools from the beginning. It requires billions of dollars in investments, massive computing power, and the development of cutting-edge GPU technologies needed to train AI models. We never fostered an innovation culture in this area,” argues Maciej Kawecki.
Poland and the entire Central and Eastern European region have the potential to play a significant role in the global AI revolution. Scientists, programmers, and entrepreneurs from this part of Europe successfully compete with major global tech giants. However, there is still a noticeable dominance of companies acting as executors and integrators of foreign solutions rather than AI innovators developing advanced proprietary technologies. Polish tech firms usually rely on infrastructure built by Western, particularly American, leaders. Yet, Poland has the potential to develop an entire innovation ecosystem, though financial constraints remain a major barrier.
“The budget of a single American university that develops technological products often exceeds Poland’s entire national budget for science. This illustrates why we are where we are today. Developing AI tools requires enormous investment, and because we have not fostered the right environment, many talented experts capable of creating these technologies have left Poland,” says the president of the Lem Institute.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and innovative AI-based projects could be crucial for national security. A study by the Rzeszów University of Technology, “Threats and Challenges in Cybersecurity,” highlights that the maturity of quantum technologies will bring new security challenges. One of the most commonly cited risks is post-quantum cryptography and the need to adapt data encryption methods for the post-quantum era, as this could lead to the loss of confidentiality for previously encrypted information, posing a potential threat to national security.
“If we are attacked using artificial intelligence, the only effective defense is to use the same technology or an even more innovative approach. This is why investing in AI, quantum cryptography, and quantum physics is an investment in our security. That is why Poland is developing a quantum computer in collaboration with the Silesian University of Technology, the Warsaw University of Technology, and the Polish Cybersecurity Component,” adds Dr. Maciej Kawecki.
