Twenty leading European research institutes, companies, and EuroHPC centres have joined forces to launch the OpenEuroLLM project, which is developing open-source language models with a budget of €52 million to strengthen European digital sovereignty.
The initiative, launched on February 1, 2025, is coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czech Republic) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (Silo AI, Finland), who are directing Europe's largest artificial intelligence project. The consortium members include significant players such as Germany's leading AI sector company Aleph Alpha, Finland's CSC, which operates one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers, and the continent's first GenAI company to go public, France's LightOn. The project uniquely unites European AI expertise: The project is not about a general-purpose chatbot but about building digital and AI infrastructure that enables European companies to innovate in the AI field, stated Peter Sarlin.
The OpenEuroLLM initiative aims to develop fully open-source, multilingual foundational models that can be fine-tuned to meet the specific needs of both industry and the public sector. Funded under the Digital Europe Programme and supported by the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP), the project strongly emphasises European values, including democratic transparency and community involvement in the development process. Key professional partners within the consortium include LAION, the open-sci network, and the OpenML community.
Sources:
Thomas Macaulay
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