Alibaba’s Joe Tsai Says Open Source Is Europe’s Best Shot at AI

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Joe Tsai said open-source artificial intelligence is Europe’s best route to technological independence from the US and China, and urged the region to build out its own computing infrastructure to train and run AI models.

“No country would want to entirely trust another country’s technology: if there’s a change in government, a change in circumstances, they can just shut off the technology from you,” he said, speaking at the Wave by Vento conference in Turin, Italy on Wednesday.

“What Europe needs to do is to get really serious about creating the compute infrastructure to allow these models to run, to train the models and run inference on Europe-based infrastructure,” he continued, referring to the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained.

He added that Europe isn’t making the most of its AI researchers, who are often highly sought after by US and Chinese labs. Europe should focus on training AI models on proprietary industrial data to gain an edge, he said.

Factories in China “have very valuable manufacturing data, and all that data can be quite valuable in training models,” he said. “In many countries in Europe, we still have large industrial bases here.”

Tsai said he was bullish on Europe’s raft of so-called neoclouds, specialized cloud-computing firms that operate data centers kitted out with AI chips.

He added that China was intentionally focused on open-source models and publishing research to boost uptake globally, contrasting this unfavorably with the proprietary models mostly offered by US firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.

“The American labs, closed-source labs, they don’t write papers any more because they don’t want to share,” he said. “They want to be closed.”