The race to build DeepSeek in Europe is on

Against this background, Europe’s reliance on American-made artificial intelligence is increasingly starting to look like a liability. In a worst-case scenario, although experts consider this possibility remote, the United States could choose to block access to artificial intelligence services and critical digital infrastructure. What makes more sense is that the Trump administration could use Europe’s reliance as leverage as both sides continue to do so Settle a business deal. “This dependency is an obstacle in any negotiations, and we will increasingly negotiate with the United States,” Taddeo says.

The European Commission, the White House and the UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.

To hedge against these risks, European countries have tried to move AI production onshore Financing programs, Targeted editingAnd partnerships with academic institutions. Some efforts have focused on building competitive macrolinguistic models for indigenous European languages, e.g It opens and GBT-NL.

As long as ChatGPT or Claude continues to outperform European-made chatbots, America’s lead in AI will grow. “A lot of times, these are winner-take-all areas,” Najdel says. “When you have a very good platform, everyone goes for it.” “Not being able to produce the latest technology in the field means you won’t be able to catch up. You will always be feeding the big players with your input, so they will improve and you will be further behind.”

Pay attention to the gap

It is unclear precisely how far the UK or the EU intend to push this pressure to “Digital sovereignty“Does sovereignty require complete self-sufficiency across the sprawling AI supply chain, or only improved capability in a narrow set of specialties? Does it require the exclusion of US-based providers, or only requires the availability of local alternatives? “It’s quite ambiguous,” says Boniface de Chambris, senior policy director at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a membership organization for technology companies. “It seems more like a narrative at this point.”

There is no broad agreement on which policy tools we should use to create the conditions necessary to enable Europe to achieve self-sufficiency. Some European suppliers are calling for a strategy to require, or at least incentivize, European companies to buy from local AI companies – similar to local AI companies. You mentioned China’s approach To the local processor market. Unlike grants and subsidies, such an approach would help boost demand, says Ying Cao, CTO at Magics Technologies, a Belgium-based company that develops AI processors for use in space. “This is more important than just access to capital,” says Kao. “The most important thing is that you can sell your products.” But those who advocate open markets and deregulation argue that trying to exclude US-based AI companies risks putting domestic companies at a disadvantage against their global counterparts, as they are left free to choose which AI products suit them best. “From our point of view, sovereignty means having a choice,” de Chambres says.

But for all the disagreement over the finer details of the policy, there is widespread belief that closing the performance gap for American leaders remains largely possible even for labs with limited budget and resources, as DeepSeek has shown. “If I really thought we wouldn’t catch up, I wouldn’t (try),” Najdel says. SOOFI, an open source model development project in which Najdel is involved, intends to roll out a competitive general-purpose language model worth about $100 billion. border During the next year.

“Progress in this area will no longer depend in large part on the largest GPU clusters,” Najdel says. “We will be the European DeepSeek.”