Europe is moving decisively away from U.S. tech giants toward open-source alternatives, driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and reliability of American companies[1]. At the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, industry leaders emphasized that this shift isn’t about isolation but resilience.
“What we’re really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source allows us to be sovereign without being isolated,” said OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez[1:1].
This transition is already happening. The German state Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email solutions. Similar moves have been made by the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon[1:2].
European companies are stepping up to fill the gap with open-source alternatives, including:
- Deutsche Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud
- OVHcloud’s sovereign cloud services
- STACKIT and VanillaCore’s European-based offerings[1:3]
The movement gained additional momentum when the European Commission appointed its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024[1:4].
Well, respect AI, there is a big one from Swiss, Apertus with its PublicAI, using the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), also used by the CERN. All 100%FOSS and privacy centred. I currently use the PublicAI in my bookmarks (free account (nick,mail). The Apertus dataset can also be downloaded if someone want to selfhost it (~90 GB min)
No thank you. Even if its FOSS it wastes tons of resources.
Well, compared to the energy used by the LHC, anyway, the Swiss use mostly Hydro-electric plants for the Energy, normal in Alpine zones. (~65% of Swiss energy is renevable (Hydro, Solar, Eolic). Even used the heat produced by the CSCS.
https://www.cscs.ch/publications/press-releases/2015/installation-of-a-microhydro-plant-at-the-cscs-pumping-station-for-the-production-of-electrical-energy-using-the-cooling-water-from-supercomputers
Anyway, there are tons of EU alternatives, even superior, to US products and services. It’s not a tecnically but an political problem to switch, which at least is on the way.
The LHC does not pollute the internet and produces 100s of millions scraping requests. The LHC is a truely glorius enginiering marvel.
Read about the procedence of the Apertus Data, there isn’t any copyright violation scrapping.
Why don’t we just stop calling it AI and call it software? The Swiss have some potentially very useful maybe even revolutionary software. Ok great, let’s see it and let’s see what they do.
Agree, better to call it LLM, because intelligence is needed by the user, not a thing of an algorrithm. And yes, Swiss is known for good products, but as said before, also other EU countries use products which are even better as the ones from the US. Only rest to also use these. See eg. the German KDE and its products, even the US forked these, eg. Blink and WebKit are forks from the KHTML engine by KDE, used by its Konqueror browser (Linux only).