VivaTech Again Calls For AI Sovereignty – How Should Europe Deliver Model, Economic And Strategic Autonomy?

European AI sovereignty re-emerged as a central theme at the 2026 VivaTech conference, with renewed urgency driven by recent government actions in the US. While often framed as a singular objective, in practice sovereignty spans three distinct layers:

• Infrastructure: control over compute, cloud, energy and data.
• Models: the capability to build and deploy frontier AI systems independently of other regions.
• Economic value: the ability to capture meaningful returns from AI investments.

Achieving sovereignty across all three layers enables a region or nation to attain ‘strategic autonomy’ – effectively de-coupling its AI stack from other regions or nations.

Although Europe still has a long way to go, there has been visible progress at the infrastructure level. Neoclouds continue to invest in European AI data centres, while governments are allocating substantial funding to support the development of AI supercomputing capacity.

The same momentum is not yet evident at the model layer. European leaders such as Mistral and Aleph Alpha have emerged, but general-purpose foundation models still lag behind those developed in the US (predominantly closed-source) and China (increasingly open-source).

Regulation is often cited as the primary constraint on Europe’s competitiveness, but capital availability and access to top-tier talent remain the more decisive factors. With anticipated IPOs from OpenAI and Anthropic, coupled with bottomless US private capital markets, this gap is likely to widen further.

To address this structural imbalance, some stakeholders advocate for the creation of single national or regional champions. However, this approach risks building – in effect – national monopolies, potentially slowing the pace of innovation over time.

A more effective strategy lies in fostering a ‘challenger AI’ ecosystem. This model brings together existing national foundation model players (such as Aleph Alpha and Mistral) and promotes close collaboration across the entire stack – including domain experts, model developers and infrastructure providers. By pooling resources, Europe (and other challenger nations) can more effectively fund the development of frontier models, leveraging its most distinctive advantage – high-quality, domain-rich data.

Several players are pursuing strategies that fit alongside this model:

• Aleph Alpha and Cohere are partnering to combine talent with capital investment to support the development of sovereign AI models.
• Mistral acquired Emmi AI to support the development of physical AI – frontier models that address use cases in industrial engineering.
• Siemens is working with select customers to build an industrial foundation model (IFM) to power a range of domain-specific applications. This model is designed to understand complex industrial systems, support manufacturing workflows and meet strict SLA requirements for critical operations.

But sovereign foundation models are not enough. If Europe wants to achieve strategic autonomy, it must start to accrue economic value from foundation models through differentiated B2B solutions tailored to the industries where Europe has clear competitive strengths (and data), including manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, pharmaceuticals and energy.

Mistral’s industrial engineering approach embodies this strategy, as it partners with leading European players (for example, Airbus, ASML and SAP) to deploy domain-specific sovereign AI solutions. Meanwhile, Siemens follows suit with the Eigen Engineering Agent. Eigen aims to compete in the US-dominated AI coding market through deep system-level integration and domain specificity. This will, once released, be supported by Siemens’s IFM delivering a sovereign, full-stack coding solution that can expand across industrial AI applications.

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