AI and chips in Amsterdam

Why this conversation

AI runs on hardware, and in Europe the people who design chips and the people who write the software on top of them do not often share a stage. Etiënne vantKruys wants to change that. On the day after AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe in Amsterdam, the host sat down with him to talk about AICA, the conference on AI and chips he is putting together in the same city, and about what he took away from AGNTCon.

He introduces himself first. He has lived in the Netherlands for 33 years. He is originally from Suriname, a small country in the north of South America and a former Dutch colony, which is why the Netherlands has a large community of Surinamese descent. He came for university, became a venture capitalist, and has a big heart for technology. Who else the show met that week is in AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026: who we met.

Hardware and software in one room

AICA is a two-day event in the last week of November, covering hardware and software: hence AI and chips. He wants a continent-wide conversation on the current state and the future development of technology in Europe, and he thinks Amsterdam is the right place for it.

Why put the two together? Back in the day, he says, hardware makers and software engineers seldom met in the same room, “hence why we got drivers and blue screens.” To build what he calls a European stack, he wants both in the room, from industry and from academia. That is why the line-up mixes researchers, engineers and industry leaders.

His reasoning is about people. When you become an expert in any field, you tend to develop tunnel vision. A conversation with someone in an adjacent field can give you a broader understanding of what you are researching or building. If people leave with a wider network across fields that overlap, even after only two days, he will feel the event has contributed to the conversation happening across the continent.

Technical first

Asked whether AICA is more about sovereignty or more technical, he points to the programme on the website: most of the topics are technical. The audience is mostly builders, AI engineers and people with a computer science background, from academia and from research teams at companies such as Mistral and Hugging Face. The angle is research and development. There are breakout rooms too, and he invites the community to use them to give tutorials and workshops and share their work.

What AGNTCon left behind

Asked about his wow moment at AGNTCon, he describes a conversation from the day before. Going home and reading his notes, he felt the energy in the room, but no one has a clear idea yet of what it is going to become. “We’re adding bricks and cement to a building,” he says, but nobody knows what that building will look like. That uncertainty is a bit scary, he admits, and also very interesting.

The conversation then turns to composability, as tools stack on top of each other: a model, a system prompt and a user prompt, then a harness and MCP tools. It touches on an AI-powered vending machine seen at the event, and on Europe’s record of invention, from Philips to Nokia.

Bringing people together

His own contribution, he says, comes from being a networker: he loves people and loves bringing them together. Beyond the event he hopes to start a conversation with regulatory bodies about how technology investments are taxed and how start-ups on the continent can get more funding, especially at the growth stage.

All the information about AICA is on aica-summit.com, where there is also a way to contribute. He welcomes everyone to join.