Beyond the Smartphone

Samsung’s Quiet Bid to Build Europe’s AI Infrastructure

MWC 2026 and the emergence of the AI Infrastructure Stack

Each year, the global telecom industry gathers in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. For decades the event served primarily as a stage for the evolution of mobile networks and the devices that connect to them. But walking through the halls of MWC 2026, the atmosphere felt fundamentally different.

Smartphones were still present, of course. Yet the deeper narrative unfolding across keynotes, closed-door briefings and operator demonstrations was not about the next device cycle. It was about infrastructure — the invisible architecture that will underpin artificial intelligence, connectivity and digital sovereignty for the coming decade.

In that shifting landscape, one company stood out for attempting something unusually ambitious: building a vertically integrated AI infrastructure stack spanning silicon, networks, devices and industrial systems. The company was not an American hyperscaler or a cloud provider.

It was Samsung Electronics.

Interview — Professor Martijn Heck (2)

The Architecture of Intelligence: Why Better Chips Matter More Than Bigger Datacenters

I travelled to Eindhoven again, this time not to speak about geopolitics or sovereignty, but about something far less visible — architecture. Not the architecture of buildings, but of systems. Because in the age of artificial intelligence, power no longer resides primarily in steel, land or energy. It resides in the way information moves.

Professor Martijn Heck received me in the same understated manner as before: no grand statements, no rehearsed narrative, only a willingness to follow the logic wherever it led. Our previous conversation had revolved around photonics and Europe’s position in the world. This time, I asked a simpler question:

What, in his view, is the core of the story?

He did not hesitate.

“Heterogeneous integration.”

Prof. Dr. Martijn Heck
Professor of Photonic Integration — Eindhoven University of Technology

The term sounds technical, almost administrative. But as he spoke, it became clear that he was describing something far more consequential: the merging of fundamentally different technologies — electronic chips, photonic components, radio-frequency systems, memory and packaging — into a single functioning whole.

Not a better component, but a different kind of system.

Private Architects of the AI State

How four accounting firms became the operating system of modern governance

The Big Four

In 2024, a European government department quietly awarded a major transformation contract to one of the Big Four. The firm would redesign core data systems, advise on regulatory compliance, oversee risk management frameworks and later help audit the results. To insiders, this was routine. To outsiders, it raised an unsettling question: when the same organizations design, implement and assess the machinery of government, where does independent oversight actually reside?

This pattern repeats across Western economies. From tax systems and healthcare reforms to defense procurement and AI governance, Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG now sit inside the control rooms of both state and market. Their formal mandate may differ — auditor, consultant, systems integrator — but their practical role increasingly converges: they operate the connective tissue of complex societies.

“The consulting industry does not just provide advice; it performs a ‘confidence trick’. By outsourcing their brains, governments are losing the ability to think for themselves, becoming ‘infantilized’ and increasingly dependent on the very firms that hollowed them out.” Mariana Mazzucato — Professor of Economics, University College London; author of The Big Con

Mazzucato’s critique captures a deeper transformation. The Big Four are no longer merely service providers; they are becoming institutional memory banks, policy translators and operational architects for governments that have shed internal expertise over decades of outsourcing and austerity. In the process, a new form of “shadow governance” has emerged — not conspiratorial, but structural.