Building AI (In)dependence through EU’s AI Factories

This paper analyses the European Union’s flagship initiative to become an international leader in AI: the 19 AI Factories, spread across 16 EU Member States. At the moment, a few large AI companies from the US (‘Big AI’) hold key parts of the AI market. Smaller European startups therefore struggle with barriers to entry, lock-in effects, and dependencies in the global ‘AI race’. The AI Factories try to respond to this – but to what extent can they achieve their high ambitions? By employing a doctrinal analysis of the relevant EU law and semi-structured interviews with nine industry experts (six AI startup representatives, two Big AI representatives, and one AIF representative), the study analyses the capacity of the AI Factories to function as public alternatives to Big AI. Our findings indicate that while the AI Factories – on paper – offer free access for startups to AI-optimised supercomputing, technical support, data services, and regulatory guidance, their real-world impact remains limited at this time. This is mainly due to limited awareness among startups, misalignment with startups’ commercialisation needs, and restrictions that limit AI Factory use to model training rather than deployment. Furthermore, the platform lock-in to Big AI further reduces startups’ willingness to ‘migrate’ and train their models with the AI Factories. The paper concludes that, as of now, the AI Factories alone are unlikely to reduce startups’ reliance on Big AI, but combined with stronger competition enforcement and targeted industrial policy, they could contribute to a more self-reliant European AI system.