AI Europe facing the trap of facade sovereignism? 🇪🇺 At VivaTech 2026, several major players in the European sector, brought together by NVIDIA, deliver a relentless diagnosis: to win, it is imperative to release the models and aim for leadership global. Watch the video intervention.
In the crowded aisles of VivaTech 2026, the word “sovereignty” is on everyone’s lips, often brandished like a magic shield against the American and Chinese giants. But behind the smooth political speeches, what does the technical reality of European digital independence look like?
This is the central question of the highly anticipated panel organized by NVIDIA: Why sovereign AI needs Open Models?. Moderated by John Ashley, Chief AI Architect for the Global Public Sector at NVIDIA, this debate brought together the best of the French open source and technology ecosystem: Michel-Marie Maudet (LINAGORA), Pierre-Carl Langlais (Pleias), Gautier Cloix (H-Company) and Neil Zeghidour (Gradium).
Far from theoretical postures, the speakers delivered an uncompromising account of the need for open infrastructure and the danger of technological isolationism.
Michel-Marie Maudet (LINAGORA): the map of Small Language Models (SLM) in production
First to speak, Michel-Marie Maudet, general director of LINAGORA, recalled the origins of a somewhat crazy bet launched in 2023 with Pierre-Carl Langlais: to train truly and totally open models, not only at the level of network weights, but also from the training dataset.
“Restrictions on access to technologies are no longer science fiction, it is our daily reality,” insists Michel-Marie Maudet. “Faced with this, our strategy does not consist of copying the giant American models. We rely on smaller, highly specialized models, aligned with our values and our languages, capable of working as close as possible to the applications.s. THE”
This pragmatic approach is already bearing fruit in the high security field. LINAGORA is currently deploying this type of model, combined with recovery augmented generation (RAG) systems and agentic architectures, on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior and National Police in order to process data from the most critical and sensitive systems in France.
To support this ambition, Michel-Marie Maudet announced a major infrastructure milestone: after consuming more than a million GPU hours on the public Jean Zay supercomputer, LINAGORA will be one of the very first teams in Europe to exploit the new French supercomputer Dahliabased on the new Blackwell architecture (GB200 chips from NVIDIA), relying on the open source framework Nemotron.
Review the entire NVIDIA panel at VivaTech 2026 (video)
The specter of Minitel: the warning from Gautier Cloix (H-Company)
The most salient moment of the panel came from Gautier Cloix, CEO of H-Company, the gem specializing in computer use (AI agents capable of interacting directly with a screen, keyboard and mouse like a human). Integrated into NVIDIA’s Nemotron coalition alongside giants like Perplexity, H-Company today displays execution scores higher than those of Anthropic or OpenAI in this segment.
Asked about the notion of sovereignty, Gautier Cloix threw a wrench into the pond:
“We talk a lot about sovereignty, but we only win if we are a world leader. If we decide to build something while remaining confined to France or Europe, it’s like training without ever going to the Olympic Games. We slowly end up becoming a second-rate model. In France, we have had magnificent innovations in the past which failed because they remained strictly local. We invented the Minitel; he stayed in France. If sovereignty becomes an excuse to play in a lower league, it does not serve us. HAS”
H-Company proves the value of this global ambition: their agents focused on operational efficiency are already deployed in hospitals, achieving halve the waiting time in emergency services by freeing caregivers from repetitive computer tasks which take up 60% of their time.
Open source as a skills accelerator
Neil Zeghidour (CEO of Gradium) and Pierre-Carl Langlais (co-founder of Pleias) completed this diagnosis by demonstrating that opening up codes and data is the only way for Europe to catch up.
Neil Zeghidour recalled that the world’s biggest models (whether Llama de Meta or Google’s audio technologies) were historically designed by researchers based in Paris. Open source acts as a talent magnet and a lever for commercial protection: by sharing training recipes and models (as NVIDIA does with Nemotron), we allow an entire ecosystem to innovate incrementally.
For its part, Pleias continues to structure the data layer thanks to its Common Corpusthe world’s largest fully reusable, royalty-free dataset. Pierre-Carl Langlais thus unveiled the release of a large-scale infrastructure model developed in collaboration with the RATP for its supervision systems.
What to remember in conclusion
The conclusion of this panel sounds like a warning to European decision-makers: digital sovereignty cannot be achieved through protectionist subsidies or withdrawal. It will be built through the adoption of an open, auditable and transparent technological base, capable of competing on the global market from day one. Thanks to players like LINAGORA, Pleias or H-Company, Europe is proving that it has the brains and the infrastructure to lead this battle, provided it targets the summits, and not the periphery.
Transparency note: Linagora has financed Goodtech.info (formerly Toolinux) since May 2000.
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