Alibaba Chairman Urges Europe to Build Independent AI Infrastructure
Joe Tsai urged European nations to adopt open-source AI and develop domestic computing infrastructure to avoid dependence on the United States and China.
Alibaba Group Holding Chairman Joe Tsai urged European nations to develop their own computing infrastructure and adopt open-source artificial intelligence to achieve technological independence. Speaking at the Wave by Vento conference in Turin, Italy, Tsai warned that reliance on foreign technology leaves countries vulnerable to supply cutoffs, stating that no country should entirely trust another's technology because changes in government or circumstances could lead to technology being shut off.
Tsai argued that Europe should utilize its industrial bases to train AI on proprietary manufacturing data and expand data center capacity for model training and inference. He contrasted the open-source approach of Chinese labs with the closed-source strategies of U.S. firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, claiming that American labs no longer write papers because they do not want to share information.
These remarks align with current European Commission efforts to reduce reliance on American cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The commission has introduced legislative proposals such as the Cloud and AI Development Act, which aims to categorize providers into sovereignty tiers based on European Union jurisdiction to limit U.S. access to government contracts.
