European start-ups confident AI race not lost to the US and China 

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The European Union will channel €200 billion into AI investments in a bid to catch up with the thriving tech ecosystems in the US and China. 

“I hear that Europe is late to the race, by the United States or China, have already gotten ahead. I disagree because the AI race is far from being over,” said Von Der Leyen on Tuesday morning during the closing of the Paris AI Summit organised by French President Macron. 

These investments are meant to help boost EU companies in developing more advanced AI systems following the release of popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.

The announcement was warmly welcomed by multiple start-ups present at the Station F incubator in Paris during the event. 

“One of the things they’ve shown is that it’s not all done to the largest companies. There’s a lot that can be done. We have lots of innovation, lots of people figuring out how to do things more efficiently, faster, more respectful of the regulations that we do have here,” insisted Yacine Jernite, Machine Learning and Society Lead at Hugging Face, a Franco-American AI company. 

The EU was one of the first powers to enshrine comprehensive regulations around AI such as the AI Act. 

But according to US Vice President JD Vance, this strict regulatory environment will simply slow down any form of cooperation with the EU. 

The US and the UK have notably refused to sign the summit’s declaration that encourages countries to abide by certain ethics of AI governance following the summit in Paris. 

Some AI experts however believe European companies need to lose some of these rules if they want to be more competitive

“what we need is European entrepreneurs working with American technology, and then we at least share the power. We share the revenue. But if we don’t do anything and want to do on our own, we will fail because we don’t have it. We don’t have it, and the Americans have it. They have the technology, the capital and the speed and the innovation. So let’s tear down the wall and accept them and cooperate with them, because the enemy is not the U.S,” explained Fabian Westerheide, a German AI expert and long-time supporter of a stronger EU AI ecosystem.