It seems unlikely at the moment. The writeup you have is quite interesting, but notably distributed compute for frontier is at least a bump in the road.

As other's have pointed out, if resources across Europe came together there could be a good amount of resources today to do so, but it is fragmented.

Project Glasswing, and most recently the blocking of Fable 5 potentially only for non-US citizens have sparked more attention in the political spheres regarding sovereignty/competitiveness of European AI.

There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: https://europe2031.ai/

So theoretically: yes, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough will to attempt to catch up with the trajectory of American hyper-scalers.

What I see as usable product in the future are smaller specialized models which are able to run and be trained with fraction of resources what goes to current frontier models.

However, we're (i think officially) in an arms race.

I wouldn't want to bet against anyone in these unprecedented times (with plenty of historical parallels).

I am guessing that enough of these questions can be answered with "no" that nobody really wants to invest.

For the same reason there isn't really a serious third start up competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic.

But if the needed total revenue for an investment is so absurdly large, that we need to capture 5-10% of the labour market, being slow might mean not burning in the crash.

The US drove the CCCP to bankruptcy by investing in nuclear bombs. Maybe history repeats itself.

What are we even doing here.

We also have buerocracy and regulations problems, but not with the AI at all. Only with the military civil dual-use restriction of thermal cameras. The ones we are allowed to sell have ridicolous resolutions. It still works, but it's barely useful.

And our colleagues across town are also world leader in their AI field. They produce all the world best face recognition SW. They had to use tricks to overcome regulations, but it works. They have their own HW as us.

And again other colleagues across town do rent their GPU computes to train their models. That's for office OCR, and speech to text.

The town is Dresden btw

We live in a world where free open weight-models become competitive with frontier model within a year or two.

It is much more lucrative and proficient in term of business to solve real problems affecting the industries / govs with A.I right now than it is to do the arm race with OpenAI or Anthropic.

That is what Mistral is doing and that served them well so far.

The problem is not regulation and never has been. Regulation is a best a minor stone in the shoes of A.I company in Europe.

The problem is somewhere else: People fails to understand that there is no equivalent in the EU to the unlimited money tap of American VCs and private funding. That's just not a thing here, the investor landscape is much more dry.

Company here just cannot stay unprofitable for 25y while surfing on stocks valuation, it does not work like that in the EU.

And as such they cannot compete with behemoth like OpenAI that burn 80B$ a year of cash while staying afloat.

I do believe the approach of Mistral is the right one: Solve actual problems right now even if not Edge and construct on top of that.

Specially if politically speaking, the White House administration continue to give excellent arguments in favor of sovereignty for the incoming decade. It might be the best strategy they have.

They already tried training LLMs.

"Training a frontier AI model" is a euphemism. The AI industry is, at present, a disproportionately resource-intensive and exploitative activity which carries only an religious promise of making up for itself at some future date (note that the beliefs being touted to board members are different than the gospel spread to users).

More accessible "non-frontier" models are being designed, built, and trained, while bigger models' gains are beginning to asymptote. Economically, Europe does not often hastily participate in new ways of wealth extraction, and with regard to sovereignty, I'd argue that "frontier" models are becoming a liability to the governments who build them and to the populations they're meant to lead.

I'm still waiting for the European computer but all microcontrollers (no processors yet) made in EU have an ARM (British-American) Cortex and the RAM is made elsewhere.

You cannot have innovation at the speed and scale that you have in the US because the legislation is cumbersome and there is no unified market with the same rules.