Less bureaucracy, more competitiveness. That was the European Commission’s promise when, almost two years ago, it launched its “simplification” drive for businesses. Today, twenty months later, discontent among those who called for that agenda is palpable. According to a Politico report that spoke with seventeen companies, consultancies, and trade bodies, the process is seen as too slow, too costly, and too complicated.

The rulebook streamlining – intended to cut “unnecessary red tape” – was meant to ignite a new era of European competitiveness. Instead, many businesses that pushed for it now call it insufficient. “An institution built to write laws is ill-suited to simplify them”: that is the core criticism Politico gathered across dozens of off-the-record interviews.

For those in the tech sector, especially companies investing in on-premise AI infrastructure, regulatory foot-dragging carries a concrete cost. Compliance with EU regulations – from GDPR to the AI Act – is a critical component of any IT architecture that handles sensitive data locally. When procedures remain opaque and burdensome, planning a hardware investment becomes riskier. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a self-hosted GPU cluster for large language models, for example, includes not just acquisition and operating expenses, but also compliance and audit costs. When rules are unstable or unclear, that bill becomes unpredictable.

This is not a niche issue. On-premise deployment is often chosen for data sovereignty, operational control, and latency reasons, but it requires a precise understanding of legal obligations and their evolution. If the EU struggles to streamline its regulatory corpus, companies find themselves trapped between two needs: keeping data in-house to protect it, while navigating a growing regulatory labyrinth. Not surprisingly, many observers note that some firms, despite wanting to move to on-premise setups, remain anchored to the cloud partly to offload compliance onto providers.

The episode signals a broader structural tension: Europe’s legislative machinery, designed to safeguard rights and protect citizens, is struggling to become an agile tool for fostering innovation. Top-down simplification efforts collide with the inertia of decades-old processes. And the business world, which once applauded the change of course, now discovers the path is rougher than expected.

For anyone evaluating an on-premise AI workload deployment, this scenario offers a lesson. Compliance is not an accessory cost – it’s a design component that must be integrated from the earliest stages. And since regulatory simplification seems to be a years-long affair, it’s wiser to build stacks that are not only performant but also easily updatable to new rules, without relying on deregulation promises. Brussels’ “simplification”, for now, remains a paper exercise.