The EU's AI future: Can the bloc compete with China, US?

Beginning in Paris on Monday, the AI Action Summit aims to create a framework for sustainable artificial intelligence. The two-day event at the Grand Palais is co-chaired by France and India, and will bring together nearly 100 countries and more than 1,000 stakeholders from the private sector and civil society.

Among them will be French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang and US Vice President JD Vance.

The meeting follows up on the UK's Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in 2023, which focused on fundamental discussions about AI  governance and safety, and the 2024 Seoul AI Summit, which touched upon the themes of innovation, inclusion and safety.

The AI Action Summit has an expanded scope, with five dedicated working groups: international governance, the future of work, security and safety, AI for general interest, and innovation and culture.

AI sector leaders

The sector is currently dominated by US corporations such as OpenAI, Google and Amazon, with the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and its cost-efficient large language model cutting in on their dominance.

EU tech startups have struggled to adopt the technology at the same pace as their US rivals, which have easier access to funding. Only France's Mistral features in the list of top foundational models.

The US retail giant Amazon invested over $25 billion (€24.2 billion) in AI and cloud infrastructure in the final quarter of 2024 and announced investments of $100 billion for this year. Presenting the company's quarterly figures recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said customer demand for these resources was so high that the company's cloud division, AWS, was facing "capacity constraints."

Just a few weeks ago, China shook up the sector with DeepSeek's large language model, which appears as powerful as its US rivals but requires less than $6 million worth of computing power to train. It has since overtaken ChatGPT to become the top-rated productivity application available on Apple's App Store.Unlike ChatGPT, its algorithm is an open-source model. 

"While the future of DeepSeek as a business is difficult to predict, the structural impact seems quite pervasive," Sanjot Malhi, partner at venture capital firm Northzone, told the news agency Reuters.

DeepSeek published details of its AI model on the day US President Donald Trump announced a project called "Stargate" backed by tech giants OpenAI, Softback and Oracle, who plan to invest about $500 billion in AI infrastructure. 

EU and AI infrastructure

France has announced that the United Arab Emirates plans to invest several billion euros to build a gigantic AI data center in the country. The planned center will be the heart of a new AI campus, the French government announced earlier this month. It will have a capacity of up to one gigawatt and cost between €30 billion ($30.98 billion) to €50 billion.

According to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), this will be the largest AI-dedicated campus in Europe and will be built to store data and provide the enormous energy required for the booming technology.

FAZ reported that ChatGPT owner OpenAI is expanding its presence in Europe, and planning to open a new office in Munich, after offices in London, Dublin, Paris, Brussels and Zurich.

"Germany is renowned for its technical expertise, academic excellence, and industrial innovation," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. "So it's no surprise it has become a world leader in AI adoption."

According to research by FAZ, money shouldn't be an issue. Germany, the newspaper noted, had the highest number of paying subscribers for ChatGPT in Europe and is among the top three countries worldwide.

Data provided by OpenAI shows Germany ranking among the top three nations outside the US in terms of business subscriptions. Above all, Germany has the highest number of developers accessing the interface (API) after the US.

While AI development in the US is no longer subject to regulatory restrictions following Trump's move to repeal previous requirements, there are calls in Europe for more state regulation. Ahead of the summit in Paris, some 100 experts from 30 countries presented the first international AI safety report and warned that AI could lead to a "loss of control" with serious consequences.

EU's AI future

German physicist Axel Naumann, an AI expert based in Switzerland, is convinced that Europe needs to promote ethical and sustainable AI models and examine their impact on innovation, transparency, and trust.

He told DW that Europe would need its own AI ecosystem, adding that it was first necessary to "show Europe's companies and institutions that it's sensible to invest together and jointly reap the benefits of open source." Naumann also said that Europe wouldn't have to "start from scratch."

Envisioning Europe's AI future, Naumann said the continent must host and process its data "sovereignly," that the software ecosystem used must "correspond to our values," and that this must be achieved by "redirecting investments from deepening dependencies to empowerment."

In the future, it should no longer be the case that Europeans merely "follow others and pay for licensing rights," he added. Europe must make a "coordinated effort toward developing a collaborative open-source product," for which it was "key" to start building infrastructure.

The AI race is on

According to Aljoscha Burchardt from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin, Europe may no longer be in the race for the largest language model — applications such as ChatGTP or DeepSeek. But contrary to many assumptions, he does not believe that only one such model will ultimately prevail

"Language models always bring a lot to the table in terms of values, features they can handle, and training data. That's why we need a pluralism of different models, just as we have different newspapers that report the same thing just from different perspectives," Burchardt told DW.

He thinks Europe's opportunities lie primarily in AI applications for specific industrial sectors and "as a society dominated by SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), we are playing a part in this in Germany and Europe."

This article was originally written in German.