Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis used a San Francisco event hosted by Endeavor Greece to court tech founders and investors, while openly acknowledging he lacks answers to many of the questions AI raises for society.
Mitsotakis said much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU’s post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, including a supercomputer built with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Lavrio that he said will soon power AI and scientific research. He described Greece as an outlier in facing little public resistance to data centers, pointing to Microsoft’s cluster near Athens and an AWS deal with the country’s largest utility to build its biggest data center in a former coal region.
On AI’s social impact, he suggested Greece’s upcoming social media ban for under-15s may already be outdated given the addictive nature of AI companions. He saw promise in AI tutors, citing an education pilot with OpenAI, but warned students already use chatbots to do their homework. He said job displacement will happen faster than any government or society is prepared for.
Mitsotakis sided with frontier lab leaders calling for AI development to slow, saying policymakers should listen when model builders admit uncertainty. He said smart regulation is inevitable, the U.S. will largely shape it, and Greece would gladly host the conversation.
