Europe’s artificial intelligence sovereignty and dependence on American and Chinese AI, Digi Mart USA News: The American artificial intelligence company Anthropic is expected to go public soon, with a valuation that could reach between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion (between €1.344 trillion and €1.792 trillion), compared with $180 billion (€161 billion) in September 2025. France and Europe will struggle to compete with the stock market power of the United States and the massive state subsidies of China, but they can still master essential links in the AI value chain, and they must do so if they want to avoid becoming vassals.
Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral AI, warned in an October 15 opinion piece published by Le Monde that leaving AI models to Americans and Chinese would place Europe in a dependence without equivalent in the history of civilizations. Olivier Redoulès, director of studies at the Rexecode institute, said that dependence on foreign AI providers would transfer a large share of added value outside Europe, toward the United States and China, widening the trade deficit.
The financial gap separating European champions from American and Chinese giants is significant. A former government adviser on artificial intelligence said that capital markets are much weaker in Europe than across the Atlantic.
In 2025, American AI companies attracted nearly $195 billion (€175 billion) in venture capital, compared with $15.8 billion (€14 billion) for all of Europe, according to the OECD, roughly twelve times less.
China is advancing quickly, benefiting from a huge domestic market and public subsidies far beyond those offered in France or Europe. A 2025 Bank of America report estimated Chinese AI investment spending at about $98 billion, 70% of which came from public funds.
At the European level, initiatives exist: in July 2026 the European Commission launched a call for tenders to mobilize €30 billion to build up to seven AI gigafactories on European soil. However, these efforts are a drop in the ocean compared with American hyperscalers.
In 2026, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle and Meta are expected to spend about $800 billion (€717 billion) on AI infrastructure.
The former adviser stressed that French and European companies suffer from a lack of demand that prevents them from growing, adding that large European industrial groups must play a bigger role as investors or customers. To accelerate, major players such as Mistral AI are calling for European preference in public procurement, but the 27 EU member states hesitate, and some countries refuse to risk upsetting their American partner.
Some French and European companies nonetheless manage to stand out between American and Chinese giants. Xavier Niel, shareholder of the Iliad group, the fifth-largest European telecom operator, owns Scaleway, a wholly owned cloud subsidiary.
Its CEO, Damien Lucas, says Scaleway offers a truly sovereign cloud with no shareholder, subsidiary or employee outside the European Union. While 70% of the European cloud is controlled by American companies, Scaleway is growing and has won major contracts with Airbus, LVMH, Maif, RATP and the Health Data Hub.
Lucas said these clients understood the need to escape the extraterritoriality of American law and to be technologically independent. OVHcloud, 3DS and other European firms are also succeeding in this segment.
A French-based AI consultant said the French and broader European ecosystem is promising. France has more than 1,000 AI startups, and Paris is considered the leading European AI capital and the fifth in the world, according to the 2026 AI Cities Index from the British magazine The Observer.
French academic excellence contributes, with recognized engineers and researchers in fundamental research, applied mathematics and quantum computing. International rankings such as the Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects place French universities, including Paris-Saclay, among the world’s best.
France is also the second most decorated country in the Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and first when adjusted for population.
Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, founders of Mistral AI, embody this excellence. Founded in April 2023, Mistral AI mastered the design and training of its own language models in a short time.
In October 2026 it released Mistral Large 4, which rivals Chinese open-source models. According to Artificial Analysis, an independent San Francisco company that tests about 500 AI models, Mistral ranks eighth, behind seven Chinese models, but outperforms them in cybersecurity and coding.
An engineer said the company is a few months behind Beijing and one or two years behind the Americans.
In September 2026 Mistral closed a €3 billion funding round, a European record, bringing its valuation to €21 billion. The company has raised nearly €6 billion in under four years and employs more than 1,000 people.
Sébastien Laye, a Franco-American economist and entrepreneur, said Europe must secure essential sovereign infrastructure so its citizens and companies can access high-quality AI that cannot be switched off from abroad. Mistral launched Mistral Compute on June 11, 2025, a cloud offering that hosts data in France and Europe, and invests in data centers in Bruyères-le-Châtel and Les Ulis in Essonne, as well as in Sweden.
France also has nuclear electricity that is inexpensive and low-carbon, an important advantage for energy-intensive model training. However, a July 8, 2026 report by a parliamentary inquiry commission on digital dependencies found that 90% of the electrical power reserved for data centers in France was captured by non-European actors establishing themselves in the country.
Europe still lags far behind the United States and China in computing power. Mistral AI aims for one gigawatt of capacity in Europe by 2030, equal to the output of one nuclear reactor.
Sébastien Laye considers this insufficient, citing Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion’s estimate that Europe needs about 15% of global computing capacity on its soil, or 25 new gigawatts by 2030.
A deeper dependence concerns chips, without which AI models cannot be trained. France does not control chip production and relies on foreign suppliers, and supply difficulties or export restrictions are possible.
Graphics processing units are designed mainly by the American company Nvidia, which holds a near-monopoly, and manufactured by Taiwan’s TSMC using lithography machines from the Dutch company ASML. French alternatives are emerging but remain marginal.
The startup Vsora, which designs AI chips, has raised more than €65 million, compared with Nvidia’s market capitalization above $5 trillion, and Nvidia reportedly holds about 80% of the global market for AI chips used in supercomputers.
The sovereignty battle is far from won. Foreign shareholders have entered Mistral’s capital: Microsoft in February 2024, followed by General Catalyst, Nvidia, Samsung, Cisco, IBM and Salesforce during the June 2024 round.
In September 2025 ASML took about 11% of the capital. In the September 2026 record round, led by South Korea’s Samsung alongside the European fund Scaleup Europe, managed by Sweden’s EQT, the American firm BlackRock and the Advent fund also joined.
The company says two-thirds of its capital remains European and that these partnerships do not undermine its independence. A consultant noted that Europe can launch promising startups but finds them harder to keep.
In September 2026, the American platform Hugging Face, founded by three French people, was bought by Nvidia for nearly $13 billion.
The article concludes that France still has engineers, energy and champions capable of preventing it from becoming a digital colony, but it will remain in the race only if it treats artificial intelligence as a strategic industry. Without sufficient capital, orders and infrastructure, it risks giving others the means of its dependence.
