This year’s G7 summit in France and the VivaTech conference in Paris are taking place against the backdrop of a single question: how can Europe develop artificial intelligence without becoming dependent on US technology? The debate has been further intensified by the US authorities’ recent decision to restrict foreign users’ access to Anthropic’s most advanced AI models.
The issue has become symbolic of a wider problem. European companies and institutions are investing billions of euros in the development of artificial intelligence, but they still rely mainly on US cloud services, integrated circuits and language models. In practice, this means that key elements of the infrastructure remain beyond Europe’s control.
This is precisely why the concept of ‘technological sovereignty’ has become one of the main topics of discussion both at the G7 summit in Évian and at VivaTech, where over 180,000 participants are expected. Representatives from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and the French firm Mistral – regarded as the most serious European competitor to US AI firms – are taking part in the discussions.
For several years now, France has been consistently promoting the development of its own technological ecosystem. The European Commission, for its part, is developing projects related to so-called AI ‘gigafactories’ and large-scale computing infrastructure, which are intended to ensure the region greater independence in terms of access to computing power.
Experts point out, however, that achieving complete independence from American suppliers will be neither easy nor quick. European alternatives in the areas of cloud computing and AI are often more expensive, and in terms of market scale and maturity, they lag behind their US competitors.
Consequently, there is a growing view that the aim should not be to replace one technology with another, but to build a more resilient model of cooperation. Under such an approach, European companies would develop their own capabilities in key areas, whilst leveraging global partnerships where this brings the greatest benefits.
However, recent events have shown that the issue of access to advanced AI is no longer purely a business matter. For Europe, it is increasingly becoming a matter of economic security and strategic autonomy.
