The US ambassador to the European Union (EU) has issued a warning to Brussels: ease up on regulating and fining American technology companies, or accept being sidelined from the artificial intelligence (AI) economy that is reshaping the world. As per a report by CNBC, Andrew Puzder made the comments in an interview on Friday (March 27), delivering one of the most direct statements from a Trump administration official on the regulations on US tech giants.
He said that if the EU wants to be a meaningful player in the AI economy, it needs American technology, and to get access to all of that, Europe needs to stop pushing American companies away.
“If the European Union is going to participate in the AI economy…They’re
going to need data centers, data and access to the United States AI hardware stack, and you can’t over regulate and move the goal post on regulations and hit companies with huge fines,” Puzder was quoted as saying.
“You know the very companies that can bring you the data, the data centers and the American AI hardware stack,” he added. “If you regulate them off the continent, you’re not going to be a part of the AI economy.”
“You know the very companies that can bring you the data, the data centers and the American AI hardware stack. If you regulate them off the continent, you’re not going to be a part of the AI economy,” he added.
‘US companies may reassess business in EU’
The ambassador went further, suggesting that the companies themselves may start reassessing whether doing significant business in the EU is worth the regulatory and financial risk.
“So I think it’s important for Europe to take a very careful look at what it’s doing with respect to those companies. And I think it’s important for those companies to look at the prospects of continuing to do significant business in the EU,” he said.
The ambassador’s comments come as the European Commission is taking aggressive regulatory action against some of America’s biggest technology firms over the past year. Apple was fined 500 million euros earlier this year; Google was hit with a massive 2.95 billion euro fine in September while Meta faced a 200 million euro penalty in April. Elon Musk’s social media platform X was fined 120 million euros in December.
Each of these actions has drawn sharp criticism from Trump administration officials. When X was fined, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.”
