As China’s DeepSeek threatens to break Silicon Valley’s AI monopoly, a European alliance has emerged with an alternative to the global tech powerhouse.

A European alliance now presents OpenEuroLLM to counter its American and Chinese rivals. Like DeepSeek, Europe wants to develop advanced open-source language models, but their agenda differs. The mission: to create a European AI that fosters digital leaders and supports impactful public services across the continent.

Multilingual base models

To achieve these goals, OpenEuroLLM is building a set of powerful, multilingual foundation models for major language models (LLMs). These models will be available for commercial, industrial and public applications.

More than 20 leading European research institutions, companies and high-performance computing (HPC) centers joined the project, writes TheNextWeb (TNW). The alliance is led by Jan Hajič, a renowned computational linguist from Charles University in the Czech Republic. Peter Sarlin is assisting him. He is a co-founder of Silo AI, the largest private AI laboratory in Europe. Silo AI was acquired last year by U.S. chip maker AMD for $665 million.

A series of prominent European tech companies, including Aleph Alpha, a pioneer in the German AI sector, CSC of Finland, which runs one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and Lights On from France, which recently became Europe’s first publicly traded Generative AI company, are also participating in the project.

Support from the European Commission

The European Commission supports the alliance. According to Sarlin, the initiative could be the Commission’s largest AI project. In an email to TNW, Sarlin states that the initiative’s strength is the fact that leading AI organizations are working together. This concentrated approach, he says, is precisely what Europe needs to build open European AI models that will ultimately enable innovation at scale.

Sarlin said the project has a budget of €52 million and computing power that may represent even greater financial value.

In addition to funding from the European Commission, OpenEuroLLM is receiving support from STEP, an EU program that encourages investment in strategic technologies.

The project is also in line with EU plans to strengthen Europe’s increasingly vulnerable digital sovereignty.

The future of AI in Europe

With China and the U.S. rapidly developing new AI capabilities, Europe faces an uncertain digital future.

OpenEuroLLM hopes to strengthen the continent’s position with new digital infrastructure. The project has also pledged to integrate AI with European values such as democracy, transparency, openness and community engagement.

According to OpenEuroLLM, the models, software, data and evaluations will be completely open. They will also be able to be fine-tuned and optimized for specific industries and the public sector. In addition, the alliance promises to preserve both linguistic and cultural diversity.

These plans come at a crucial time for the European tech sector. As U.S. and Chinese companies compete for the latest AI breakthroughs, there are growing fears that European companies, economies and even cultural identity are at risk.

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