CEO of Norway’s wealth fund

European markets are facing a crisis and must get their act together to fix it, the head of the world’s biggest individual investor has said.

Speaking to CNBC’s Charlotte Reed on the sidelines at the Euronext Annual Conference in Paris, France, Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), called on Europe to “get our act together” when it comes to unifying the continent’s capital markets.

“Capital markets, we really need to get our act together. The winner takes it all,” he said.

“People go where the liquidity is highest, where valuations are highest, and so it’s really, really important to sort this out.”

Tangen was speaking after his speech to the conference on Tuesday morning, when he said that, over the past decade, NBIM’s equity portfolio had shifted notably in favor of U.S. stocks. During that period, European stocks went from making up 41% of the portfolio to 21%, while U.S. shares jumped from making up 37% of the equity portfolio to around 55%.

Nearly 40% of NBIM’s investments are in U.S. equities, with its most valuable holdings including a 1.3% stake in Nvidia, a 1.2% stake in Apple and a 1.3% stake in Microsoft.

NBIM manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which was set up in the 1990s to invest revenues from the country’s oil and gas industry. The fund is an investor in more than 7,200 companies across 60 countries and has stakes in around 1.5% of the world’s publicly listed stocks.

The fund, the largest of its kind in the world, currently has a value of just over $2 trillion.

NBIM also invests in fixed income, real estate and renewable energy infrastructure.

Tangen told CNBC the changes in NBIM’s equity holdings over the past 10 years were “an extraordinary shift” and attributed it to Europe lagging, behind when it comes to technology and innovation.

“It is because of the U.S. companies’ dominant position in AI we do not have strong companies in Europe in that field,” he said.

In 2025, the sovereign wealth fund posted an annual profit of 2.36 trillion kronor, or $246.9 billion, much of which was attributed to the strength of the tech sector.

“I think what Europe can do is, of course, be better at applying AI and there are some signs that, in terms of diffusion of technology, Europe is doing pretty well,” Tangen said.

“It’s urgent to do this,” Tangen said of reforming European markets. “We cannot have such a fragmented capital market in Europe. We won’t get the liquidity, we won’t get the depth of the market.”

Tangen said Europe needed to consolidate and implement more unified rules to make cross-border trade easier, or risk falling “further behind.”

Market watchers and regional officers have spoken of the urgent need to overhaul European capital markets.

In January, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called on European leaders to finalize the…