New paper outlines EU's 5-pillar plan for AI sovereignty

A groundbreaking research paper titled "Beware of GeeksBearing Gifts: Building True EU Frontier AI Sovereignty" published on arXiv paints a stark picture of Europe's AI dependence. The authors—Nick Moës, Toni Lorente, and colleagues—quantify the gap: the US possesses approximately sixteen times the EU's AI supercomputing capacity, and only 15% of global hyperscale data centre capacity resides within EU borders. Frontier AI models originate almost exclusively from the US or China, leaving Europe structurally dependent for economic output, military capability, and democratic institutions. While the European Commission has accelerated policy responses, existing initiatives remain fragmented and lack a cohesive vision for securing strategic autonomy.

The paper introduces a unified framework connecting five sovereignty pillars—economic competitiveness, resilience, security and defence, European values, and foreign relations—to a decomposition of the frontier AI stack into five layers, 26 components, and 29 sub-components. This lens reveals critical gaps, redundancies, and trade-offs that current EU policy leaves implicit. Using the AI Gigafactory Initiative as a case study, the authors show how a sovereignty-centric view exposes conflicts between economic framing and security needs. They identify 92 relevant initiatives from four major Commission communications, providing policymakers a structured basis to design, evaluate, and prioritize interventions across multiple dimensions of European strategic autonomy.