Alibaba's Joe Tsai Urges Europe to Build Its Own AI Compute Infrastructure

On October 7, Joe Tsai, chairman of Alibaba Group, told the Wave by Vento conference in Turin, Italy, that open-source AI is Europe's best option to reduce dependence on the United States and China. He called on Europe to invest in its own compute infrastructure and run model training and inference locally.

Tsai said no country wants to rely entirely on another country's technology, as a change in government or circumstances could cut off supply. Europe, he argued, must take compute infrastructure seriously so models can be operated on local facilities.

He also suggested European countries should leverage proprietary industrial data to train models, pointing to China's factories as an example of valuable manufacturing data. He noted Europe still has a large industrial base in many countries.

Tsai expressed optimism about Europe's emerging "new cloud service providers," companies that operate data centers equipped with AI chips. He added that China tends to focus on open-source models and public research to promote global adoption, while U.S. firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic mainly offer proprietary models.