Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis used a San Francisco visit to pitch his country as a tech-friendly destination, speaking to about 250 founders and investors at an Endeavor Greece event. He pointed to an improving economy: Greece is paying down debt at a record pace and borrows more cheaply than the United States, with its 10-year bond yield around 4.3% versus about 5% for U.S. Treasuries.
He also highlighted how roughly €36 billion from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, including an online portal for government paperwork and a supercomputer in Lavrio set to come online within months for AI and scientific research. Policy changes include new stock option taxation, loosened labor laws, and seven-year tax breaks for returning Greeks.
But Mitsotakis was notably candid about AI's societal effects. He said a planned social media ban for children under 15 may already be outdated given AI chatbots, remarking that governments are "fighting yesterday's battle." He warned that job displacement will occur at a speed no society is prepared for, and he sided with frontier lab leaders calling for a slowdown in AI development, adding that the U.S. will largely shape any regulation. He also noted Greece has seen no significant backlash to data centers, citing Microsoft's cluster near Athens and an AWS-backed project in a former coal region.