Presumably by "half of the EU" you mean (sometimes) euro-sceptic states like Hungary or Poland? Well, these are not in EU because some illuminati/lizard people tricked them into joining and now won't allow them to leave, like some of their politicians would like you to believe, but because they enjoy billions of subsidies per year.

If it is "not obvious to you how they extract the value", you can just look for NET (their ticker) earning reports and SEC fillings since they are a publicly traded company instead of spreading conspiracy theories...

What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.

Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:

- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).

- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.

- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.

You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.

As a person who was born in the Soviet Union I can easily imagine that...

[0]: https://ai-2027.com/ [1]: https://ai-2040.com/

It still produce full-blown hallucinations for me sometimes, even in 2026. The kinds ChatGPT stopped generating by 2025. It is cheap and fast though.

What is even their motivation to not be backed up?

Western lefties consider farmers their class allies, and white-collar engineers and tech billionaires their class enemies. Which is not universal BTW because those kinds of farmers that hold water right in California would have a hard time in Soviet Union, for example.

People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".