Europe Is Fed Up and Wants Its Own AI

European leaders are accelerating a push for AI sovereignty, driven by fears of over-reliance on American technology and a political climate under the Trump administration that they say makes the status quo intolerable [1]. At the Vivatech conference in Paris this month, the dominant theme was the prospect of being locked into using American AI, trained on American values [1]. While the US and China compete in an AI arms race, France and Germany feel boxed out and are touting plans to build independent capabilities [1]. Aiden Gomez, CEO of Toronto-based Cohere, conveyed the urgency at the overlapping G7 conference in Evian-les-Bains. "We need to ensure that a democracy occupies the number two position, and that's not true today," Gomez said [1]. He added, "I think the G7 understands that we need a diverse supply chain of AI providers" [1]. Investment figures underscore the gap. One statistic cited repeatedly at the conference was that Anthropic's recent $65 billion fund-raise exceeded the entire sum invested in European and UK AI startups last year, a claim EU reports appear to support [1]. The global push to construct specialized AI data centers has accelerated dramatically during the AI boom of the 2020s, with major tech companies estimated to spend $650 billion on such facilities in 2026 [2]. Memory manufacturers have prioritized production of High Bandwidth Memory essential for AI servers, leading to a global supply shortage [2]. French President Emmanuel Macron has made some progress in attracting capital. His "Choose France" initiative has won pledges of over 100 billion euros in AI infrastructure, anchored by Softbank's 75 billion-euro commitment to build large data centers in France, pending approvals [1]. On the collaboration front, Gomez says Cohere is building a multinational chain of partnerships, beginning with German AI firm Aleph Alpha, to pool engineering and infrastructure resources for a "sovereign-first" approach [1]. Cohere, which specializes in large language models for regulated industries, agreed to acquire Aleph Alpha in April 2026 [7]. Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer who recently resigned as Meta's chief AI scientist, is pursuing Project Tapestry, a massive effort among governments and private industry to build an open frontier foundation model. "The governments of the world all want AI sovereignty," LeCun said. "The only way I can see this happening is if there's an open, free foundation model, on top of which anybody can build their own specialized assistant for their own language, culture, value system, and political biases" [1]. A new element in 2026 is the Trump administration's policies, which European technologists say are making the US an unwelcome place for scientists and researchers [1]. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO of AI-based biotech firm Inceptive, noted that talent began moving away from the US during Trump's first term, a trend that has accelerated [1]. "I'd have no problem assembling an all-star team of Europeans, many of which would leave their very cushy current US frontier lab jobs, provided two things: reasonable personal incentives and they have to be able to do their best work," Uszkoreit said [1]. The administration's attempt to place Anthropic's Claude Fable model under strict export control regulations, denying access to foreigners, served as a wake-up call [1]. "The attention we currently have in Europe would not have been the same without Trump," said Michael Förtsch, CEO of chip startup Qant [1]. Uszkoreit summarized the shift: "The US just made it clear that in the new world order, that's over" [1].