Open Source Building Blocks for Europe’s Independent AI Future Ecosystem

As large language models (LLMs) rapidly enter European products and public services, most of the underlying AI infrastructure still comes from non‑EU providers. This creates not only technical and economic challenges, but also legal and strategic risks, as sensitive data and critical capabilities depend on platforms governed by foreign laws.
The talk highlights how familiar trade‑offs, such as cost versus control, convenience versus compliance, and features versus freedom, are relevant in the AI and LLM contexts. The speaker draws on more than a decade of experience delivering IoT and big data solutions for companies in Alto Adige/Südtirol and beyond to outline how open‑source LLMs, European cloud providers, and hybrid architectures can help organisations reduce dependency on non‑EU AI platforms, keep European data under European jurisdiction, and gradually build more autonomous AI systems that align with EU values and regulations.
The talk also argues for Alto Adige/Südtirol as an ideal place to focus on Sovereign AI efforts. It provides a strong existing open‑source culture with a network of SMEs, public bodies, and research institutions that already collaborate on digital innovation. It also provides real-world use cases for agriculture, tourism, public administration etc. Furthermore, its cross‑border, multilingual context also closely reflects the challenges many European regions face, making locally developed solutions with open‑source LLMs and EU‑based infrastructure directly transferable to the wider EU context.