This three-part series is published in partnership with the AI Now Institute.
Frederike Kaltheuner advises governments, funders, and institutions on AI industrial policy, sovereignty, and competition. She is also an advisor at the AI Now Institute. Previously, she was the founding Director of the European AI and Society Fund, Special Adviser to the Vice-President of the European Commission, and the founding Director of the Technology and Rights Division at Human Rights Watch.
Leevi Saari is a PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam and an EU Policy Fellow at AI Now Institute, researching the political economy of AI governance
In this piece, we argue why European AI Sovereignty is intricately connected to its existing dependence on three US cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
As a result, each of Europe’s attempts to build its way out risks deepening the very dependence it aims to cure. By boosting demand for AI, especially at the frontier, it also boosts demand for proprietary models bundled with the dominant cloud providers. By building gigafactories, it trains models that then run on hyperscaler infrastructure. And by building its own compute for inference, it risks subsidizing capacity for the leading US AI firms, the only customers large enough to fill it.
Read the article here.