European companies are building their own AI stack

A wave of European companies is now investing in their own AI stack rather than relying on US providers. The drivers are both legislation and control over their own data.

A central concern is the US CLOUD Act of 2018, which requires US companies to give American authorities access to data they manage — regardless of where the data is physically stored. If a European company sends data to an American API, that data falls under the regulation even if the datacenter sits in Europe.

At the same time, the EU AI Act is approaching full applicability in August 2026, where compliance becomes a structural requirement for market access. Enterprises across the continent are therefore auditing their entire digital supply chain to ensure they meet the new standards. Building on a sovereign stack means you automatically inherit a robust compliance posture with data processing in Europe.

Among the prominent European players is Mistral AI, a French frontier AI company building a three-layer stack: training in France, inference in Sweden, and deployment broadly via its acquisition of Koyeb. In Germany, Aleph Alpha offers traceable and explainable models focused on transparency. Sweden has also produced some of the most successful EU AI companies in the 2025-2026 period.

Major industrial groups such as ASML, Airbus, Siemens, SAP and Mistral AI are calling for stronger industrial coordination and simplified regulation to strengthen Europe's position. One example of a combined European offering pairs SAP's data governance, Siemens' industrial expertise and ServiceNow's workflow automation on top of Telekom's sovereign infrastructure — a GDPR-compliant full stack.

The message is clear: for data-driven companies, it comes down to who actually owns the technology at the core of the business.