Europe’s AI Startups Look to Capitalize on the Continent’s FOMO
Entrepreneurs, investors and officials say that building local artificial intelligence companies is a geopolitical necessity.
Europe has effectively sat on the sidelines during the development of the modern internet economy, as Silicon Valley and China built the world’s largest consumer technology and cloud computing companies. As the consensus builds that artificial intelligence is tech’s next inflection point, European business leaders and public officials fear history will repeat itself, with potentially disastrous strategic and economic consequences. “If your competitors have electricity, you don’t want to be left with an oil lamp,” says Cédric O, France’s former digital minister.
One place into which anxious investors have been pouring money is the German startup Aleph Alpha GmbH, a Heidelberg-based company that’s constructing large language models similar to those of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. When Lakestar Advisors GmbH, a venture capital firm with offices in Zurich, Berlin and London, backed the startup in 2021, the firm cited its desire to invest in “European digital sovereignty.”