4 Signals from the Munich Security Conference Showing Geospatial Intelligence Is the Next Frontier at the Top Table

By Johanna von der Leyen, CEO & Co-Founder, PangeAI

MUNICH, Feb. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — PangeAI leadership just came back from three intense days at the 62nd Munich Security Conference. At the Bayerische Hof, more than sixty heads of state gathered. Two hundred and seventy side events took place in Munich. This year’s conference was, by any measure, the most consequential gathering of global leaders since the rules-based international order began its current unraveling.

Everyone is talking about what was said on the main stage. These were the headlines, and they deserved to be. But I was listening for something else. As the co-founder of a geospatial AI company, I was paying attention to the gaps – the moments when leaders articulated problems that are, at their core, problems of spatial awareness. Problems of knowing where things are, when they changed, and what that means for energy security, critical supply chains, territorial integrity, and the physical infrastructure of civilization.

What I heard was clear: geospatial intelligence is no longer a niche capability for analysts. It has arrived at the top table. Here are four signals that tell that story.

Signal 1: “Strategic Autonomy” Is Fundamentally a Geospatial Problem

The phrase that echoed most through the Bayerischer Hof this weekend was strategic autonomy – Europe’s imperative to stop depending on the United States for security guarantees, intelligence, and critical infrastructure. Chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference with its sharpest possible framing. Speaking from the main stage on Friday, he warned that the era of outsourced security was over:

“Europe needs to become a real player in global politics with its own security policy strategy… not to replace NATO, but as a self-sustained strong pillar within the alliance.” — Friedrich Merz, German Chancellor, MSC 2026 Opening Address

What struck me was how abstract this conversation remained whenever it left the stage and entered the corridors. Europe wants autonomy. But autonomy requires knowing things independently – knowing where Russian forces are concentrating, where energy infrastructure is vulnerable, where supply chains are exposed. These are geospatial questions.

The European Space Agency’s Director General Josef Aschbacher was in Munich specifically to make this connection, with ESA’s official pre-conference statement noting that his participation “reflects the growing recognition that space has become a core element of Europe’s security architecture.” ESA’s new European Resilience from Space initiative is a direct response to the recognition that without independent Earth observation and satellite intelligence, European strategic autonomy is a slogan, not a capability.

The intelligence layer beneath almost every autonomy discussion at Munich is spatial. At PangeAI, we believe the question is not whether Europe needs geospatial intelligence – it’s whether it can access that intelligence fast enough, in natural language, without requiring a team of GIS specialists for every query.

Signal 2: Space Is No Longer a Footnote – It’s the Architecture

For most of MSC’s six-decade history, space policy was a side conversation. Not anymore. This year, dedicated sessions explored how innovation is reshaping the space and security landscape, the strategic relevance of cislunar space, and the future of Europe’s space industrial capacity. Accenture ran a session explicitly on why “space is now central to European defense and security,” covering AI-driven situational awareness, quantum-secure communications, the IRIS² satellite constellation, and Copernicus.

The investment numbers frame the shift starkly. Germany has committed €35 billion between 2026 and 2030 on space security, including new synthetic aperture radar satellite constellations to replace aging infrastructure. Berlin is now the largest contributor to ESA at 23% of total budget. Poland has increased its ESA contribution tenfold in three years. And ESA Director General Aschbacher recently stated his agency’s overarching mission clearly:

“The geopolitical drive – the desire for autonomy and independent access to space – was at the very origin of ESA fifty years ago. Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation, where the need to strengthen Europe’s independence has again become a major driver in space policy.” — Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director General

This is not an incremental investment cycle. It is a structural recognition that the physical world – borders, battlefields, pipelines, ports – must be understood and defended through persistent overhead observation combined with AI that can make sense of the data in real time.

The proliferation of satellite data is not, by itself, a strategic advantage. The key bottleneck to unlock is analysis: turning petabytes of imagery, radar returns, and spectral data into actionable intelligence. That is exactly the gap geospatial AI is designed to close. The hardware is being built. The question is who builds the intelligence layer on top of it.

Signal 3: The Geopolitics of Resources Demanded a Map Nobody Had

One of the most striking sessions on the formal agenda was titled “Raw Power: The Geopolitics of Resources.” Foreign ministers from Norway, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Argentina sat alongside Germany’s Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and the Executive Director of the US National Energy Dominance Council. The conversation ranged across critical minerals, energy corridors, and supply chain chokepoints.

The most revealing moment came not from that panel but from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s main-stage address on Saturday. In his vision for a revitalized transatlantic alliance, he named the physical supply chain of the planet as a central front.

Rubio was speaking about minerals as geopolitics. But he was also describing a geospatial intelligence problem. Where are the deposits? What does the satellite record show about construction along energy corridors? Where are the chokepoints in European electricity interconnectors, and how has their vulnerability profile changed in the last twelve months?

These questions are answerable today. The data exists – in Copernicus archives, commercial SAR constellations, multispectral imagery, and open-source intelligence. What has been missing is the ability to ask those questions in natural language and get a verified spatial answer in minutes rather than months.

Signal 4: The AI Conversation Was Missing Its Spatial Dimension

The MSC Innovation Night, held on the eve of the conference under the theme “Strategic Algorithms: Winning the AI Arms Race,” brought together defense innovators and policymakers to debate AI’s security implications. The German Foreign Office made artificial intelligence a centerpiece of its side event agenda alongside defense and research security. But the one dimension conspicuously absent from almost every AI panel was the spatial one.

The AI debate at Munich, as in most policy forums, was dominated by large language models, cyber defense, and autonomous weapons. These are real and important. But they represent only one part of what AI applied to security actually means. The most immediately actionable AI capability for almost every problem discussed at MSC 2026 – from tracking critical mineral supply chains to assessing energy infrastructure resilience – is geospatial AI. The ability to process satellite imagery, fuse it with sensor data and open-source intelligence, and answer natural language queries about the physical world is not a future capability. It exists today.

The BCG Defense Innovation Report, launched at the Innovation Night, identified a persistent gap between defense innovation priorities and the system’s ability to deliver capabilities. Geospatial AI is one of the clearest examples of that gap: the technology is mature, the data is available, and the demand is urgent.

What This Means

I co-founded PangeAI because I believed the physical world was being systematically underrepresented in the AI revolution. Language models can reason about text. But most of the decisions that matter in energy, in insurance, in national security, or in natural capital are decisions about places, assets, and the changing state of the Earth’s surface.

Munich 2026, convened under the banner of “Under Destruction,” confirmed that belief with a force I did not entirely anticipate. The world’s security leaders are grappling with problems – strategic autonomy, resource geopolitics, territorial verification, infrastructure resilience – that are fundamentally spatial in nature. They are doing so largely without the geospatial intelligence layer those problems demand.

That gap is closing. Europe is building the satellite architecture. The data is accumulating. The AI is ready.

The question is who builds the interface between that data and the people who need it most.

We intend to.

Johanna von der Leyen is CEO and co-founder of PangeAI, a geospatial AI company that enables energy, insurance, and natural capital organizations to query the physical world in natural language. PangeAI emerged from stealth in December 2025.

Want to learn more? Reach out: [email protected]

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