Italy is preparing to take its technology diplomacy to the United States, with a government and business delegation travelling from New York to North Carolina and Washington in an effort to translate an increasingly close political relationship into industrial partnerships in some of the technologies expected to shape economic competition in the years ahead.
Alessio Butti, Italy’s undersecretary for technological innovation, will lead the mission, bringing together companies, research institutions and government officials around an agenda spanning artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 6G networks, cybersecurity and energy.
The itinerary itself helps explain the logic behind the trip. In an op-ed published in Il Sole 24 Ore ahead of the mission, Butti describes a journey beginning in New York, moving through one of America’s leading research and innovation ecosystems and ending in the federal capital.
- The common thread is an effort to connect Italian research and industry more closely with the US centres developing some of today’s most strategic technologies.
What they’re saying: “Technological competition, after all, has already changed,” Butti writes.
- “Having good ideas and developing innovative products is no longer enough: computing power, network security, access to energy, semiconductors and data all matter.”
- His argument provides a broader lens through which to read the relationship Rome is building with Washington.
From political alignment to industrial ties. Over the past several months, the technological dimension of the Italy-US relationship has expanded beyond traditional bilateral economic ties. Cooperation increasingly encompasses infrastructure, standards, computing capacity and the supply chains that will sustain the next generation of industrial competition.
- This is why the first stages of Butti’s mission are particularly telling. Before reaching the political institutions in Washington, the delegation will focus on research, capital and companies.
In New York, the Italians will visit IBM’s research centre in Yorktown and meet investors. The mission will then move to North Carolina, where Rome wants to deepen connections with one of America’s most advanced innovation ecosystems. Butti points in particular to the Q-Alliance, which includes IonQ, while meetings are also planned at the Duke Quantum Center and RTI International.
- The objective set out by the undersecretary is distinctly practical: identify technologies with industrial applications, shorten the distance between the laboratory and the market, and build connections through which Italian companies — including SMEs and start-ups — can gain access to American research and investment networks.
- The mission therefore goes beyond conventional trade promotion. It is also about finding a place for Italy’s industrial base within the ecosystems where technologies with long-term economic and strategic implications are being developed.
Washington brings politics into the equation. Washington will provide the political counterpart to this industrial push.
- At the White House, talks will focus on secure networks, trusted technological infrastructure and the computing capacity required for the development of artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. At the State Department, Butti will resume the dialogue launched in Geneva with Adam Cassady, Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy.
- The Pentagon leg will focus on the relationship between computing power, AI applications, energy availability and the protection of critical infrastructure. The agenda also includes a project developed with Arca for modular infrastructure in which supercomputing, AI, quantum technologies, cybersecurity and energy can operate as an integrated system.
- The trip, in other words, comes at a point when Rome and Washington are trying to give industrial substance to a technological relationship that has already acquired a clearer political architecture.
6G shows where Rome is heading. The clearest example may be 6G. Italy has joined the US-led coalition aimed at coordinating trusted partners over future sixth-generation networks, entering the contest before standards, supply chains and industrial architectures have been consolidated. This marks a significant difference from 5G, when geopolitical concerns emerged after Chinese suppliers had already established substantial positions across international markets.
- With 6G, strategic competition is beginning while much of the technology is still being researched and its standards negotiated. As Decode39 previously reported, Rome has chosen to enter that process from the outset.
- Italy’s position goes further than political participation. Butti has proposed complementing the established principle of “security by design” with “trust by design”. As networks become increasingly intertwined with artificial intelligence, the question will no longer concern only who manufactures hardware and software, but also whether the algorithms operating critical infrastructure can be considered transparent, explainable and accountable.
- In that sense, 6G represents a broader Italian bet on the American technology ecosystem.
AI and the logic of trusted supply chains. A similar dynamic is emerging around artificial intelligence.
- By joining the US-led Pax Silica initiative, Italy has inserted itself into a network connecting AI, semiconductors, infrastructure and critical minerals through the principle of trusted supply chains.
- The decision, analyzed by Decode39 when Italy joined the initiative, points towards a conception of technological sovereignty that depends less on national self-sufficiency than on securing a meaningful position within an ecosystem of trusted partners with complementary industrial capabilities.
This is also the context in which the concept of “Trusted Technologies” is becoming increasingly relevant to the bilateral dialogue over emerging technologies. Trust is no longer attached solely to an individual piece of equipment or a particular supplier. It increasingly extends across the environment in which innovation and industry meet: research, capital, companies, infrastructure, data and supply chains.
- For Italian businesses, that evolution partly changes the meaning of the transatlantic relationship. The United States remains a major market and source of investment, but it is also becoming a technological ecosystem into which Rome wants its companies to become more deeply embedded through joint research, common standards, industrial alliances and trusted supply chains.
An Italian bridge across the Atlantic. There is also a European dimension to the strategy, one that Butti makes explicit in his op-ed. Closer cooperation with Washington, he argues, does not diminish Italy’s European identity. Rome can instead help connect “the two great technological spaces”, while bringing attention to the protection of rights into the transatlantic relationship.
- That may prove one of the more consequential aspects of the Italian approach. Agreements on AI, quantum or 6G matter politically because they define the perimeter of trust, influence which partners build infrastructure and supply chains together, and determine who is present when standards are written.
- Their economic significance, however, will depend on whether businesses can translate that political proximity into investment, contracts, joint research and commercially viable technologies.
The bottom line: Butti’s American tour therefore comes as the Italy-US technology relationship attempts to move into its next phase.
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Despite occasional communication frictions between Palazzo Chigi and the White House in recent months, the broader political alignment has established the framework. Italian companies will now have to turn it into industrial advantage.
