Elsewhere, the EU recently signed an $11 billion deal to create a sovereign satellite constellation to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink.
So OpenEuroLLM is certainly on-brand.
However, the stated budget just for building the models themselves is €37.4 million, with roughly €20 million coming from the EU’s Digital Europe Programme — a drop in the ocean compared to what the giants of the corporate AI world are investing. The actual budget is more when you factor in funding allocated for tangential and related work, and arguably the biggest expense is compute. The OpenEuroLLM project’s partners include EuroHPC supercomputer centers in Spain, Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands — and the broader EuroHPC project has a budget of around €7 billion.