European AI alliance looks to take on Silicon Valley and develop home-grown LLMs

A new alliance with a budget of €37.4 million is working on a European alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1.

OpenEuroLLM is a consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies, and EuroHPC centers hoping to develop a family of high-performance, multilingual, large language foundation models for commercial, industrial, and public service applications.

The aim is to create a home-grown rival to models from foreign tech firms, trained specifically on European data.

"The transparent and compliant open-source models will democratize access to high-quality AI technologies and strengthen the ability of European companies to compete on a global market and public organizations to produce impactful public services,” the consortium said.

"The OpenEuroLLM project is aligned with the imperative to improve Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty."

The consortium will work with open source and open science communities such as LAION, open-sci and OpenML, along with additional experts in the field.

Models, software, data, and evaluation will be fully open, researchers said, and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industries or public sector bodies.

Additionally, the model will be trained in 35 languages.

The project will be co-led by computational linguist Jan Hajič of Czechia's Charles University and Peter Sarlin, co-founder of Finland's Silo AI - Europe's largest private AI lab, which was acquired last year by AMD for $665 million.

It also includes a dozen European universities, along with Germany's Aleph Alpha Research and ellamind, France's LightOn, and Spain's Prompsit Language Engineering.

Also participating are four EuropHPC centers: the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, Cineca Interuniversity Consortium in Italy, CSC - IT Center for Science in Finland, and the Netherlands' SURF.

"The OpenEuroLLM project stands as a testament to Europe’s ability to lead in AI innovation while adhering to principles of openness, trust, and fairness," said the Eindhoven University of Technology in a statement.

"By involving research institutions, industry leaders, and EuroHPC centers, the initiative ensures a broad and inclusive approach to AI development."

The European Commission has backed OpenEuroLLM to the tune of €37.4 million, with €20.6 million coming from the Digital Europe Programme.

The consortium is supported by the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP), aimed at raising and steering funding to increase European investment into critical technology projects.

"Europe has the talent and resources necessary to take a leading position in this global AI competition," said Laurent Daudet, co-CEO and co-founder of LightOn.

"To transform these efforts into a real strategic lever, Europe must not only capitalize on the AI Act, a true catalyst for innovation towards trustworthy AI, but also support a coordinated approach from its leaders. This is now possible thanks to the OpenEuroLLM consortium."