As China’s DeepSeek threatens to dismantle Silicon Valley’s AI monopoly, a European alliance has emerged with an alternative to tech’s global order.
They call their project OpenEuroLLM. Like DeepSeek, they aim to develop next-generation open-source language models — but their agenda is very different. Their mission: forging European AI that will foster digital leaders and impactful public services across the continent.
To support these objectives, OpenEuroLLM is building a family of high-performing, multilingual large language foundation models. The models will be available for commercial, industrial, and public services.
Over 20 leading European research institutions, companies, and high-performance computing (HPC) centres have enlisted in the the project. Leading their alliance is Jan Hajič, a renowned computational linguist at Charles University, Czechia, and Peter Sarlin, the co-founder of Silo AI, Europe’s largest private AI lab, which was acquired last year by US chipmaker AMD for $665mn.
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They’re joined by an array of European tech luminaries. Among them are Aleph Alpha, the leading light of Germany’s AI sector, Finland’s CSC, which hosts one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers., and France’s Lights On, which recently became Europe’s first publicly-traded GenAI company.
Their alliance has been backed by the European Commission. According to Sarlin, the initiative could be the Commission’s largest-ever AI project.
“What’s unique about this initiative is that we’re bringing together many Europe’s leading AI organisations in one focused effort, rather than having many small, fragmented projects,” he told TNW via email.
“This concentrated approach is what Europe needs to build open European AI models that eventually enable innovation at scale.”
The project has a budget of €52mn, as well as compute commitment that may have a larger monetary value, Sarlin said.
Alongside funding from the Commission, OpenEuroLLM has received support from STEP, an EU scheme to boost investment in strategic technologies.
The project also aligns with the EU’s plans to fortify Europe’s digital sovereignty, which is becoming vulnerable.
Europe’s AI future
With China and the US developing new AI capabilities at breakneck speeds, Europe faces an uncertain future in the digital landscape.
OpenEuroLLM hopes to strengthen the continent’s position with new digital infrastructure. The project has also pledged to embed AI with European values of democracy, transparency, openness, and community involvement.
According to OpenEuroLLM, the models, software, data, and evaluation will be fully open. They will also be capable of fine-tuning and instruction-tuning for specific industry and public sector needs. Additionally, the alliance promises to preserve both linguistic and cultural diversity.
The plans arrive in testing times for European tech. With US and Chinese firms racing to deliver new AI breakthroughs, fears are growing that European companies, economies, and even culture are under threat.
Sarlin wants OpenEuroLLM to bring new hope to the continent.
”This isn’t about creating a general purpose chatbot — it’s about building the digital and AI infrastructure that enables European companies to innovate with AI,” he said.
“Whether it’s a healthcare company developing specialised assistants to medical doctors or a bank creating personalised financial services, they need AI models adapted to the context in which they operate, and that they can control and own.
“This project is about giving European businesses tools to build models and solutions in their languages that they own and control.”