Building a European digital road network, however, poses a significant challenge. Leevi Saari, a Finnish researcher at the University of Amsterdam and AI Now Institute, said: “As DeepL wants to scale up its services, it needs more capacity, and what Amazon offers would have looked very tempting.”
In a global AI boom, building datacentres has become increasingly expensive and the rate at which hardware chips lose their value has increased, meaning that in spite of AWS outages in 2025, few European companies have switched to local clouds. As machine translation companies switch to live text and voice-to-voice translation, the main technical issue they are trying to address is datacentre latency, Saari said.
Datacentre latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel from point A to point B, which is usually measured in milliseconds. AWS achieves low latency by having established a network of datacentres around the world and by laying its own network of subsea fibre-optic cables.
“Currently, the gravitational forces of the AI industry are such that startups will end up being pulled towards the US,” said Saari. “How can Europe create its own AI gravity well? That’s the trillion euro question.”
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