In a single week of September, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta each unveiled frontier models — and so did China’s Alibaba, Zhipu, and DeepSeek. Europe unveiled none. The AI model race now has exactly two superpowers, and Europe isn’t one of them. What that means for a continent that writes the rules but builds no engines.
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face — the “GitHub of AI” — for $12.9 billion. If it holds, the company controlling 90% of AI chips would own the open ecosystem’s neutral commons. A brilliant move, a concentration risk, and the loss of a rare European-founded champion. Reported, not yet confirmed.
Nvidia just answered the question hanging over AI: the boom isn’t slowing, it’s accelerating, with five US giants set to spend $1.3 trillion next year. Boom or bubble, the scale is staggering — and Europe, able to regulate AI but not to build it, is barely at the table.
Google’s Pixel 11 gives Gemini an agentic power that reads every app on your screen — banking and messages included — to act on your behalf. A genuine leap in usefulness, and the most intimate access an AI has ever had to your phone. What it means, especially for Europe.
Meta released Muse Glimmer, a capable 30B agent that runs air-gapped on hardware you own — no cloud, no per-token bill. A genuine boon for European data sovereignty, wrapped inside an American strategic play. What it changes, and what the “open” label conceals.