As someone keen on working on AI Ethics and Governance from Nepal, I am currently expanding upon my thesis and doing an independent study on the AI Ethics and everything surrounding it. I’m researching AI governance around the world. This time I am looking at Europe. So, let’s dig deep into this continent from the lens of its AI standpoint.
European Commission on AI, at first begins with the inevitable need and growth of AI in the current landscape. It starts with the importance of taking AI hand in hand as a friend so that the citizens can enjoy all the perks and advancements that AI can bring in several domains. Here’s a video from their official website.
The EU talks about the ‘European approach to artificial intelligence’. Let’s see what this means: EU wants to create the balance between 2 key components: excellence and trust.
These 2 ambitions are inseparable. To unlock the full potential of AI, Europe must build an ecosystem of excellence that leverages its strengths in research, industrial know-how and regulatory capacity across the AI value chain. At the same time, developing an ecosystem of trust is essential to promote confidence in AI and provide legal certainty for businesses to innovate.
It has several bodies or rather components that help EU to implement what has been written on paper.
Established in June 2024, this body aims to help in:
Increasing adoption and integration across key industrial and public sectors, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by promoting AI-first strategy.
The AI Act is the first-ever legal framework on AI, which addresses the risks of AI and positions Europe to play a leading role globally. The aim of the rules is to foster trustworthy AI in Europe.
The AI Act ensures that Europeans can trust what AI has to offer. While most AI systems pose limited to no risk and can contribute to solving many societal challenges, certain AI systems create risks that we must address to avoid undesirable outcomes.
AI Giga factories are large-scale infrastructure projects designed to significantly boost Europe’s computing capacity. They are a central component of the AI Continent Action Plan, which aims to establish the European Union as a global leader in artificial intelligence.
In July 2026, the EU launched a call for tenders to establish up to seven AI Giga factories across Europe. This initiative is expected to unlock more than €30 billion in investment.
These factories are intended to accelerate Europe’s technological sovereignty. By providing the necessary large-scale computing infrastructure, they support the development, deployment, and uptake of AI technologies across strategic sectors like healthcare, industry, and environmental sustainability.
AI Gigafactories work alongside AI Factories (smaller-scale hubs for AI innovation) and other investment tools like the InvestAI Facility to build a comprehensive European ecosystem of excellence.
It is designed to create the conditions to give smaller companies greater access to key ingredients for developing AI: data, computing, algorithms and talent. This also includes access to supercomputing.
This aims to stimulate the uptake of generative AI across the EU’s key strategic industrial ecosystems.
These are just some important ones mentioned in the official site. You will be surprised at how vast and deep are the policies and rules and everything. It actually makes you think!
What struck me most was that Europe isn’t treating AI as a technology issue alone. It is approaching AI as an ecosystem : one that requires computing infrastructure, research, talent, industrial adoption, investment and governance.
This made me look at Nepal and it’s AI ecosystem from a more informed lens.
As someone from South Asia, more specifically, Nepal, I can see how ambitious the EU’s attempt on accepting, integrating and nurturing the AI ecosystem is. I can’t help but think when will we as a country or a community reach such level ? It might actually be a very long institutional journey.
In Nepal, we have National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy, 2025 which is a major milestone in the country’s commitment to the increasing AI innovation. However, if we compare it to the larger societies, its still new. Although the rules and policies are in paper, it all comes down to the implementation part. Implementation in the ground level is something that we care about the most in our countries with developing economies; cause time and again the unstable governments have let us down when the implementation part comes into play.
Some of the key areas we need to work on as a community, with strong and sustained support from the government, include:
Europe isn’t merely trying to regulate AI. It is trying to build an entire ecosystem around AI , while simultaneously building the governance mechanisms needed to make that ecosystem trustworthy.
For me, perhaps, Nepal doesn’t need to replicate Europe’s AI ecosystem. But we can learn from the way Europe is thinking about AI : not only as a technology to develop, but as an ecosystem that needs infrastructure, talent, adoption and governance to thrive.
Thanks for reading :)
Note: ChatGPT was used as a writing and editing aid for parts of this article, particularly for language and structure. The research, sources, analysis, and perspectives presented are my own.
Europe Wants to Become an “AI Continent”: A Perspective from Nepal was originally published in Towards AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.