Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis courts AI sector in US
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis pitched his country to Silicon Valley tech leaders while warning that global governments are unprepared for the rapid pace of AI disruption.
During a visit to San Francisco, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis pitched Greece as an emerging technology hub to an audience of approximately 250 founders, investors, and operators. After touring Tesla and Sequoia Capital, Mitsotakis highlighted Greece's economic recovery, noting that the country is set to reclaim its developed market status next year from index provider MSCI. He pointed out that Greece's 10-year bond yield has dropped to around 4.3 percent, compared to roughly 5 percent for U.S. Treasuries, a massive shift from 2012 when Greek yields exceeded 40 percent.
To attract tech talent and businesses, Greece has utilized a significant portion of its 36 billion euro post-COVID recovery fund from the European Union to build digital infrastructure. This includes a new supercomputer assembled with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Lavrio, scheduled to launch within months to power scientific research and AI. Additionally, the government has revised stock option taxation, eased labor laws, and offered tax cuts for up to seven years to returning citizens. Tech giants are already investing, with Microsoft constructing a data center cluster near Athens and Amazon Web Services partnering with Greece's largest utility to build a major data center in a former coal region.
Despite courting infrastructure, Mitsotakis expressed deep concern over the societal impacts of artificial intelligence. Greece is launching an education pilot with OpenAI to reduce administrative tasks for teachers, but the prime minister warned that students are already using chatbots to bypass homework. He noted that Greece will ban social media for children under 15 starting in January, but admitted that governments are "already fighting yesterday's battle" when confronting addictive AI companions.
For AI practitioners and founders, Greece's aggressive push offers a highly competitive alternative to the tightening regulatory and visa environment in the United States. The combination of tax incentives, new supercomputing resources, and a welcoming stance toward power-hungry data centers makes the Mediterranean nation a viable operational base. However, developers must navigate a shifting European regulatory landscape, as Mitsotakis signaled strong support for smart regulation and even backed calls from frontier labs to slow down development if safety cannot be guaranteed.
This is our own summary of reporting by TechCrunch AI
