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EU unveils its sovereign AI stack: CADA, Chips Act 2.0, open source
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Braid Daily · 2026-06-03

EU unveils its sovereign AI stack: CADA, Chips Act 2.0, open source

Brussels puts a Cloud and AI Development Act, a follow-on chips act, and an open-source strategy on the table to cut reliance on US tech.

Dark editorial cover: a ring of EU stars rendered as circuit traces dissolving into server racks, captioned SOVEREIGN STACK
Brussels puts its compute, chips, and open-source bets on the table in one package.

The lead

1

The European Commission unveiled a tech-sovereignty package on 3 June meant to cut the bloc's reliance on US tech: a Cloud and AI Development Act, a Chips Act 2.0, and an EU open-source strategy. The stated aim is to triple Europe's data-center capacity within five to seven years.

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Diagram of the EU tech sovereignty package: Communication branching to CADA, Chips Act 2.0, and an Open Source Strategy
The 3 June package, broken into its three legislative pieces and their headline targets.

Inside the sovereignty package

3

Chips Act 2.0

European Commission

The Commission's follow-on chips proposal adds new measures to boost the bloc's semiconductor capacity and supply chains.

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The numbers behind the package

Bloomberg via Techmeme

CADA targets tripling EU data-center capacity over the next five to seven years, and the chips proposal would allow direct EU investment.

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Models & weights

2

Alibaba ships Qwen3.7-Plus

VentureBeat via Techmeme

A multimodal proprietary model with a one-million-token context window at $2 per million tokens, which Alibaba puts at 60% cheaper than the text-only Qwen3.7-Max.

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Microsoft's on-device Aion 1.0 models

Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA)

Microsoft showed two on-device models at Build 2026 — Aion 1.0 Instruct and Aion 1.0 Plan — pitched on agentic reasoning and tool-calling at small sizes.

“next-generation small language model, smaller, faster and more efficient”

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Capital & compute

4

DeepSeek's first funding round

Reuters via Techmeme

DeepSeek is set to raise about $7.4 billion from investors including Tencent and CATL, at a valuation between roughly $52 billion and $59 billion.

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Threads worth pulling

5

Labs chase recursive self-improvement

Financial Times via Techmeme

The FT looks at how OpenAI, Anthropic, and AI startups are pursuing 'recursive self-improvement' — AI that can improve itself with little to no human input.

“recursive self-improvement”

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Companion episode

Permission Slips and Poured Concrete

· 00:18:06

Europe's pitch lands the same morning JP Morgan flags the US data-center build-out running behind, and DeepSeek raises $7.4 billion at home. The sovereignty question this week is less about model quality than about who owns the compute underneath it.