Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2666 actions· ✨ 90 recent

The UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) launched the Sovereign AI Fund on 16 April 2026, a £500 million state-anchored equity vehicle chaired by James Wise (Balderton Capital) and designed to operate at venture-capital speed. The Fund makes direct equity investments in UK-headquartered AI startups and bundles allocations of UK AI Research Resource (AIRR) supercomputer capacity alongside investment tickets; an initial cohort of six startups received up to one million GPU hours each and Callosum received the first equity ticket. The Fund is the principal operational implementation of the AI Opportunities Action Plan (CP 1241, January 2025) compute-and-capability pillar and has a dedicated government portal at sovereignai.gov.uk.

On 1 February 2026, at Web Summit Qatar, Qatar's Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani announced that the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) is expanding its Fund of Funds programme with an additional USD 2 billion in capital, taking the programme's total committed capital from USD 1 billion to USD 3 billion. Five new venture capital managers — Greycroft, Ion Pacific, Liberty City Ventures, Shorooq, and Speedinvest — are joining the programme, spanning AI, fintech, blockchain, infrastructure and special-situations strategies, bringing the total number of participating fund managers to 12 with an aggregate AUM of roughly USD 10 billion.

Italy enacted Legge 23 settembre 2025, n. 132 — "Disposizioni e deleghe al Governo in materia di intelligenza artificiale" — published in Gazzetta Ufficiale Serie Generale n. 223 of 25 September 2025 (atto 25G00143) and entered into force on 10 October 2025. The statute makes Italy the first EU member state to enact a comprehensive national AI law complementing Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (EU AI Act), designating AgID (Agency for Digital Italy) and ACN (National Cybersecurity Agency) as national oversight authorities under Presidency-of-the-Council-of-Ministers coordination. It sets sectoral rules for healthcare, labour, intellectual professions, public administration and the judiciary; authorises up to €1 billion in state-backed venture capital (via CDP Venture Capital) for AI, cybersecurity and telecoms; creates criminal penalties of up to five years' imprisonment for harmful deepfakes; mandates parental consent for under-14 users; and delegates secondary legislation to the Government across multiple domains.

On 19 September 2025, the European Investment Fund (EIF), part of the European Investment Bank Group, signed a EUR 260 million (USD ~305 million) anchor-investor commitment into Jolt Capital V, a growth-stage deep-technology venture capital fund targeting a EUR 1 billion final close. The commitment is funded largely through the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI), an EU-backed programme that has committed over EUR 2.5 billion across 11 scale-up technology funds and aims to mobilise EUR 10 billion in total resources for late-stage European tech companies. Jolt Capital V will invest in growth-stage B2B companies across semiconductors, cybersecurity, AI, industry 4.0, new materials and mobility, sectors the EIB Group frames explicitly around European strategic autonomy and competitiveness.

The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed a $215,988,868 civil monetary penalty — the statutory maximum applicable — on GVA Capital Ltd., a Silicon Valley early-stage venture capital firm, for willful violations of Russia-related sanctions and for failure to comply with an administrative subpoena. The penalty resolves conduct in which GVA, after its founding investor Suleiman Kerimov (a Russian oligarch and Federal Assembly member) was designated as a Specially Designated National in April 2018, continued for approximately three years to manage and attempt to liquidate Kerimov's $20 million investment in a Delaware special-purpose vehicle linked to Prosperity Investments, L.P. (a Guernsey-domiciled fund in which Kerimov retained a property interest). OFAC determined the conduct was egregious and not voluntarily self-disclosed. The action is the first public OFAC enforcement of the second Trump administration and the largest OFAC civil penalty since the November 2023 Binance Holdings settlement; it is also OFAC's first major enforcement action against a U.S. venture-capital / investment-adviser firm.

Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/63 of 15 January 2025, published in the Official Journal on 16 January 2025 (CELEX 32025H0063), is the first EU-level instrument operationalising outbound-investment screening. It is a legally non-binding act that asks Member States to designate a Single Contact Point and competent national authorities by 15 March 2025 and to review outbound transactions by EU investors into third countries in three strategic sectors — advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies — covering acquisitions, mergers, joint ventures, greenfield investments, asset/IP transfers, and venture-capital instruments completed since 1 January 2021. Member States must submit an interim update by 15 July 2025 and a comprehensive report on review outcomes and identified risks by 30 June 2026, feeding into the EU's broader Economic Security Strategy and the binding outbound-investment legislative instrument the Commission has signalled for 2026-2027.