Europe is selling more into the US AI build-out, but losing market share

Europe is increasing its exports to the US AI build-out, while losing aggregate market share as computing grows faster than the power and cooling segments where European suppliers are stronger.

• Between 2022 and the 12 months ending July 2026, EU exports to the US rose by approximately €10 billion, or 55%, in electrical power equipment, €8 billion, or 77%, in compute hardware, and €3 billion, or 30%, in cooling systems.
• Europe gained about 1.6 percentage points of US import share in electrical power equipment and around 2 percentage points in cooling, while its compute share fell from roughly 4.5% to below 3% and its networking share declined by approximately 4 percentage points.
• The EU share of the selected infrastructure basket rose to nearly 10% in early 2024 before falling to about 5.7% by July 2026, as compute and networking increased from roughly 54% to approximately 77% of US imports.
• China’s share of the basket fell from around 20% in 2020 to below 5%, while Taiwan and Southeast Asia gained, with Vietnam and Thailand accounting for more than 90% of Southeast Asia’s increase between the 2022 average and the latest period.
• Production in the broader relevant industries remained around 1.5% below the first half of 2022 for the EU27, with Germany down approximately 9%, while the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary recorded strong increases; the Dutch result is likely influenced by ASML and the semiconductor-equipment cluster.

Takeaway: European suppliers are benefiting from US demand for power and cooling equipment, yet their aggregate position is weakening because computing dominates the market and European shares in compute and networking are declining; the industrial gains are concentrated in selected countries.