A new European consortium has launched with a budget of €37.4 million to aid the continent in competing with AI models leading the charge from the US and China.

The group, called OpenEuroLLM, involves 20 leading research institutions, companies and Europe HPC centres in Europe, and aims to create a range of Large Language Models (LLMs) to rival those on the market.

The aim is to create high-performance, multilingual foundation models for a range of applications trained on European data.

Further, the consortium says their open-source models will be transparent and compliant, and “is aligned with the imperative to improve Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty.”

“Cooperating with open-source and open science communities like LAION, open-sci and OpenML, and additional experts in the field assembled in the project’s Open Strategic Partnership Board, OpenEuroLLM will ensure that the models, software, data and evaluation will be fully open and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industry and public sector needs,” the consortium further explained.

The group has a particular focus on the importance of using European data to preserve “both linguistic and cultural diversity.”

The consortium, which began work on the 1st of February, has already been awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal, and leverages support from other European projects and partners.

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It will be coordinated by Jan Hajič of Charles University in Czechia, and Peter Sarlin, of AMD Silo AI, in Finland.

The AI race thus far has been largely dominated by US tech firms, though China’s DeepSeek AI has shaken the landscape up, giving renewed hope to competitors.

Among those involved in the consortium are Germany’s leading AI company, Aleph Aleph, and CSC in Finland, which houses one of the world’s top supercomputers.

“The project is a prime example of the type of technology infrastructure needed to lower thresholds for European AI product development and refinement, demonstrating the strength of transparency, openness and community involvement, values largely recognized across the European tech ecosystem,” the consortium said.