ECB Steps Up Scrutiny of European Banks’ AI Industry Exposure

February 23, 2026 by and

The European Central Bank is delving into the risks faced by banks in the region from the artificial intelligence industry, amid heightened concern over hidden credit exposures and financial-sector disruption.

The Frankfurt-based central bank is asking a small number of individual lenders for more details on their lending to areas including data centers, people familiar with the effort told Bloomberg.

In parallel, the regulator is running targeted workshops to identify how banks are using generative AI. The people asked not to be named as the matter isn’t public. An ECB spokesperson declined to comment.

Increased attention by the ECB to AI risks underlines how global regulators are aware of the potential for the technology to upend the banking sector, from transforming the business of investment advice to managing its historic need for financing. Banks and private credit firms globally have been pouring trillions of dollars into the AI build-out, which spans development companies to data centers and energy supply.

The workshops focus on aspects such as business models, governance, and risk management. At least one lender understood the ECB’s attention to signal the need for caution on lending to sectors including data centers, said one of the people.

The project pre-dates the most recent bout of turbulence related to the AI build-out, last week’s declines in stocks of money managers with exposure to private credit. The ECB said last year that the way banks use AI applications would be a priority for its bank supervisors for the three year period 2026-2028 and that it would run “workshops” on the topic.

More broadly, the ECB and other authorities have expanded previous efforts to ask banks about their dependence on technology companies, other people familiar with the matter said. That includes questions about what they would do if a cloud service provider or data center was no longer available at short notice, said the people. Data recovery and back-ups are especially relevant here, they said.

AI adoption will expose European lenders to even greater systemic threats from their reliance on foreign tech giants, the Netherlands’ top financial regulator warned in an interview with Bloomberg last year. Yet the ECB is also asking about the potential benefits that such technology presents for individual banks, said one of the people.

Another banker told Bloomberg that their firm is working on mapping its exposures to AI firms. That’s complex because they have to consider not only loans to AI firms and data centers but also other links like those to their electricity suppliers, they said.

This month stocks of firms offering wealth management services sold off as investors worried that large parts of the industry could be automated in the future. Other companies, including those in insurance and software, have seen their shares plummet this month due to speculation around the perceived threat AI poses.

Photograph: The headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB), in Frankfurt, Germany, on Tuesday, June 17, 2025; photo credit: Ben Kilb/Bloomberg

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