Von der Leyen announced plans to cut administrative burden by 25% for all businesses and 35% for SMEs by 2029, and pointed to the Industrial Accelerator Act as a tool to create stable markets for strategic sectors including steel, cement, batteries and clean technologies. She flagged a skills shortage affecting almost two-thirds of SMEs, to be addressed through a fair mobility package due in autumn, and highlighted energy costs, still two to three times higher than in the US and China, as decarbonisation is meant to become a driver of industrial transformation rather than a cost, backed by over EUR 100 billion for a Bank for Industrial Decarbonisation by 2030. On AI, she pointed to the network of AI Factories, which already brings together 19 facilities and 13 Antennas across Europe giving industry, SMEs and researchers access to AI-optimised supercomputing, and the EUR 20 billion earmarked for the next step, AI Gigafactories, as a way to secure Europe's compute supply chain and bring AI into factories; companies interested in the underlying tender, worth up to EUR 10 billion in combined EU and national funding, can find the call details on the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking's AI Gigafactories tender page. She framed the EU's overall approach as one of "independence without isolation," backed by more than EUR 450 billion mobilised through the new European Competitiveness Fund and Horizon Europe.

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