Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
edit: formatting
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
Cyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…
It was in no position to make such promises.
it was true for about 3 years give or take
Yes, all of our 20-year-old selves eventually learned that. No need to rub it in!
Missing on the list, but mostly part of it - human retardation. In politics, in private, everywhere.
The surplus binges of the 90s do not make for an accurate sample of human and politics nature.
Indeed. I first encountered the "declaration of independence of cyberspace" a few years after it was written, and at the time I was immediately reminded of the Full Metal Jacket quote that goes something like "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps!"
That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.
Maybe it can be aspirational.
Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.
Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.
Doesn't have to be a different dimension, international waters or space would do.
Both those places are heavily government controlled.
In fact international waters if you're not flagged and registered to a specific country, then it's open season for anyone to board and seize you.
Which is something the US has demonstrated so clearly recently.
I'm so mad that the bitcoin bro cruise ship never set sail. We missed out on some exciting drama.
Aside from the counterpoints made by the other responders, this still won't work: you need a physical connection to those servers, and you can't just WiFi to servers thousands of kilometers away. So the servers need to be in another dimension, so you can access them without government interference.
That's the whole plan with the space servers. As soon as we sort out a few problems, we're good to go.
Problems: Solar flare & radiation resistance. Heat dissipation. Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we).
Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially.
If we would separate energy part out and beam it somehow, we could sit in a body's shadow in some Lagrange point equivalent for a given body system and greatly reduce heat dissipation requirements and suspectibility to solar flares.
Look at what he does now, you honestly think a person this greedy would ever exercise less than maximum control?
Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding?
Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.
As someone extremely sceptical of musk, I do have some hope that competition between spacex and it's Chinese competitors will make space somewhat accessible to hobbyists.
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
Mistral Vibe is cheap for what you get - I haven't run into limits yet, and you can use the same API key for the CLI for their API to run Codestral, Mistral large, etc. Le Chat is great as well, especially research mode. Afaik their models are running on Cerebras so you are never waiting for a response.
Obviously Opus and Codex are better for coding, but I dont really use it much to generate actual code so I don't think I'm missing much.
They’re 5th off bottom on livebench
Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill.
I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved
I tried the API on a coding task and it did worse than I would've hoped. Also $5. They still have a ways to go, I think.
I also use their chat pretty frequently, it seems to "misunderstand" me more often than other models. But that's free and it isn't as irritating to rephrase a question as it is backing out code changes.
I like that they have local models available, I plan to try those sometime.
Iirc: mistral has American investors, black forest labs hq has been moved to silicon valley.
That's another problem with the idea of tech sovereignity. Anything succesful, even if it started in Europe, will go global, including literally going to the USA
Hub and spoke market model of the world. Some realities can not change. could move back to britain-canada though.
If the political regime in the US continues, that will come to an end. You can see it happening already - London has been a big beneficiary of Trump’s agenda.
Far more usable (and older AFAIK) site: https://european-alternatives.eu/
Very different sites with very different goals.
I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe
The title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.
It took a minute to load the map points here, and I was sitting thinking this is an attempt at a clever joke
If you are going to post a link to a site like this, please also say what point the link is making.
I briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything.
The list is quite sus ;) did you know that cockroachdb is a German company? :) it’s in the list. And this is like 3rd company in the category that I was checking
https://eutechmap.com/company/cockroachdb
——
On more sad note.
Europe still loves their old money, (hidden) class system and deeply entrenched bureaucracy way too much to allow some plebs to get rich that quickly.
European way of doing things to me feels like fundamentally incompatible with high pace way of doing things in software area.
Personally, I don’t believe that anything significant can come up from places other than US or China. About 10 years ago Russians were doing a lot of “own” stuff (clickhouse comes to mind first), but I suspect that isolation and brain drain will eventually capture them.
not all that useful. for a more useful alternative I'd prefer to see companies up from a certain size (I've noticed some small startups on the map) and if the're (not) using aws/azure/gcp/chinaCloud (whatever the names are).
Right, the page starts up and shows them in alphabetical order. Didn't recognize a single one.
They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
Was just looking at the map thinking: have the all moved to Gamla stan? :)
European startups, when they are successful, will eventually end up being bought by Oracle or move to USA. Such is life.
Is Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.
The European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models.
In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
I tried to find on that website the equivalents of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, TSMC, Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, Broadcom, Oracle but didn't succeed.
Zoom in Veldhoven and then try to see the equivalent of ASML anywhere else.
This is not the flex it could be. As far as I know ASML licensed their core tech from US research. Which is why they can dictate who ASML sells to.
“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side.
Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.
Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.
Feels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment.
Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
Have you heard of a little company called Arm Holdings?
It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
UK isn't European. They made that clear when they voted for Brexit.
UK is European. Membership of EU is unnecessary for that criterion to be met.
The UK is not in the EU, but it is surely european.
The UK is no longer in the EU; The UK is still in Europe and is very much European.
Yeah. Not sure if it's the intention, but what this site really shows is "the lack of European tech alternatives."
I believe the EU inc initiative attempts to fix the capital aspect
It’s just a shortcut for broken Germany to be able to found a company without a notary and 25000EUR.
That is false. You can absolutely found a company by just getting an entry as a merchant here with neither of the things you listed. If you want to found a limited liability company though, then yes, you need some monetary backing to cover for fuckups (likely the 25k are not fully covering it anyway) and a notary to make it official.
No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on.
I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
You are clearly misinformed. According to German law, you can start a UG (limited) with only 1€ + notary cost. Starting a business with personal liability doesn't cost anything.
So there are of course a lot of large EU based IT/tech companies but I guess you already know this.
As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
There are many many degrees of harm before the extreme. They can both suck at the same time.
How about European ASML?
> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.
?!?
You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
You can sell products anywhere but you’re battling 27 different sets of rules and legislations. Look at how a burger shop becomes a continent wide franchise overnight and you’ll see how that’s impossible in the EU.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
A burger shop is a hard example. Software is trivial. Distribution of goods is no harder than the US and its sales tax regime, that is different in all 50 states and can be different in each county inside that state. In EU you can use the One Stop Shop.
If you're selling software that needs to _battle_ 27 different rules, then you're doing something seriously wrong.
I don't know why this is held up as some insurmountable challenge: every US state has different laws, if you sell any software to solve business problems you'll be dealing with 50 different legal codes and regulations you have to support too.
>Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc.
The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.
The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
Yes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
I had a flip phone at the time and it certainly did more than the iPhone, but admittedly harder to use and not as good looking.
Realistically, what you're asking for won't happen unless there's a strong push for Federalisation.
Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
Yes, precisely. Going federal is the only viable l, unified, way ahead.
we need european chip makers.
ASML is European and is arguably the most strategically important company in the entire semiconductor supply chain.
ASML Holding is dominating the chip technology with their machines. It's not the lack of invention or intellectual capability that holds Europe back from the digital industry, it's the lack of willing long term European invenstors. If you want to scale your digital tech startup in Europe the most viable way is to look to the US for investors.
ASML is not a chip maker, it is a chip-maker maker. Still important though.
Europe should request a discount for ASML machines in a EU factory.
I think that it would require there to be a European chip demand. Today that demand is almost entirely for cars, so we only get mediocre car infotainment chips (+ a few other similar niches). There was more hope 20 years ago, when there were widely successful European mobile phone makers.
Peak EU mindset thinking all we need is a nifty little map application to find alternatives.
Meanwhile, tech companies are continuing to bail into the US the moment they reach significant revenue due to crushing tax and labour costs (see e.g. Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday)
Unfortunately the EU and many local governments have chosen to double down on crippling socialism (presumedly to "own Trump") so this continue at an accelerating pace.
> labour costs
Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates?
> Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday
The article I read said they were moving their HQ domicile to Delaware in preparation for a US stock market listing. A bit like US companies do. It said firmly that roughly half of its staff were already in the US, half in Finland, and that wasn't going to change.
Over the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant.
There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.
Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.
China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.
You lost all your credibility if you see AI as "a chatbot".
Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidates include an OS, a web browser, an IDE, image editing software akin to Photoshop, a fully-featured Discord/Slack/etc. replacement, a non-trivial video game, music production software, enterprise-grade database software etc., really anything that isn't just another AI tool to produce another AI tool to produce another AI tool culminating in complete psychosis and detachment from anything people do in the real world. If you would like to be the first to provide evidence that these things are more capable than chatbots in concrete terms, by all means, go ahead.
I build agents for banks for a living and can tell you for sure that you are wrong.
Making a living off of this doesn't say much when fake money is being tossed into a bonfire in a FOMO frenzy. I do contract work for an AI startup[1] myself, and I'm quite familiar with the capabilities of every model. LLMs do have real utility, but not to a degree that justifies the absolute insanity that goes into funding the American models, not to a degree that is going to lead to any kind of science-fantasy revolution with continued investment, and not to a degree where the gap between the frontier and second-tier models is in any way crippling.
LLMs are useful technology, but the correct way to go about them is to treat them as realistic tools warranting carefully measured investment rather than crafting a hype economy around pie-in-the-sky promises that can never be fulfilled, in the hopes that you won't be the one holding the bag when the pile of cards comes tumbling down. In that regard, Europe and China are in a much better position than the US.
[1] Unlike many (most?) of the companies in this space, the startup is actually profitable on its own merits, too. Bootstrapped, ran with small open-source models on a subscription fee, leveraged the profit to run bigger and bigger models before eventually being able to purchase the hardware necessary to run the full DeepSeek 671b unquantized, which is now generating further profits with no debt or reliance on outside investors, and which has been heavily finetuned for the niche we serve.
We have been overly reliant on non-European partners we could trust and rely on. That is now gone. So right now is a good opportunity for Europe to focus inward. Imagine having all the social benefits AND tech. We also need to make sure keep malignant actors like the USA & Russia at bay. One can dream.
Yes, I agree. But it was Europe that has become complacent and lazy. "Doing good" is more important than "doing right". As a result, with energy prices high, dependence on Russia only increased, and car manufacturers (Stellantis, Mercedes -50% revenue) are dying as have shipbuilders before them.
That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
Your comment is also blind to the absurd amount of research and projects which are born here but later move to look for funding.
So the EU is not irrelevant, on the contrary, we’re just mourning the fall of the US and transitioning to an independent future. Who would’ve though, we’d end up needing to build a copy of everything…
> That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
These two things are not alike. At all.
I used it as another “there was a strong tech push but ultimately we couldn’t make it work” kind of idea. With NFTs the grift was immediately visible, with LLMs it’s a bit harder, the whole “AI” facade gives people hope - I want to believe and stuff.
" we’re just mourning the fall of the US ".
Listen to Rubio's speech again.
The EU is in a managed decline, and no number of migrants will change that.
Rubio is a mouthpiece for a regime that’s not qualified to discuss Europe, or even his very own US of A. All he meant in his speech is that his government has chosen isolation
Just look at the space industry. Europe doesn't even have a proper space port.
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
I’ve raised money here and there. Never really had issues with the EU regulations.
But the lack of risk capital and investor brainpower has been a huge problem.
Yes, Europe is not as relevant in the unhealthy toy business as the US, which is a good thing.
Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me. Sounds like we’ve done this kind of nationalism in the past and failed. There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it. Especially in a company’s early days. Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
Maybe Europe shouldn’t copy the nationalism, but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Think about how they got that far, and especially how China caught up so fast.
Two counters:
1. I'm not sure China caught up so quickly due to any lack of nationalism.
2. There's an allure to working with an EU business because it's in the EU because they're less likely to jerk you around. You have no idea how many times I get told their in nothing they can do, then have to drop the 'I live in the EU and this is illegal' card, and magically the problem is resolved by the next email.
> Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me.
That depends who you are, and what you are doing. If you have information stored such that having it in US infrastructure is a national security risk, then you might think differently.
>but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist.
Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
> Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
The US and China pulling all this shit is exactly why the whole European alternatives thing is trending. Before Trump started threatening everyone, we had no problem using US tech.
Europe isn't a nation.
And the whole point here is a more diverse alternative to the extreme dependency on the US tech companies
Nothing is a nation- but something bundled together by hardship. Europe is in for hardship.
>Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
The traction which is proverbial "wind in the sails" for further development must come from somewhere. A new promotional channel might help with it.
Also I don't think it's any kind on nationalism. Just pragmatism for the very unstable times.
I think the depths of the answers here, particularly with China, are far beyond the scope of technical discussion and to be honest likely beyond the scope of European-specific tech needs. Just because the US did one thing a certain way, and China did it another way; doesn't mean Europe must follow either of those to be successful.
However, it is going to require public funds to achieve. A public/private partnership scenario is very likely at least the near to mid term future for European tech development. And the world can only stand to benefit.
Politically, nationalism is absolutely very bad and it's a shame the world is headed in this direction. This global distrust only serves chaos agents and accelerates us into another World War (if we aren't already in the early stages of one). I had hope that people would prefer to come together but it's unfortunately too risky with US politics.
> and especially how China caught up so fast.
Isn't that largely nationalism and pressuring companies to use (initially) mediocre local tech solutions though? Once the market is there, quality catches up rapidly.
> especially how China caught up so fast.
Nationalism, but armed with actual law enforcement and economical support instead of good intentions and lip service.
> There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it.
And what are these other reasons?
Creating mediocre alternatives sometimes pave the way for real alternatives as you create a talent pool.
China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another
> Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
You can’t foster excellence if you don’t reward it monetarily (enough).
No unified capital markets, no high reward as an investor.
As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
It’s a trifecta of shit.
> a year to fire people even when they don’t show up
In what country? I just checked, in France it's 15 days. The employer can ask to be paid the notice period, and the employee won't get unemployment benefits.
> As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this
After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired.
> As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds
Annual turnover of no more than £15 million
Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million
Average number of employees of no more than 50
Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees.
Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.