{"slug": "europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal", "title": "Europe Wants to Become an “AI Continent”: A Perspective from Nepal", "summary": "The European Commission is implementing a comprehensive AI strategy to make Europe an 'AI Continent', balancing excellence and trust through initiatives such as the AI Act, AI Giga factories, and the AI Continent Action Plan. The AI Act, the first legal framework on AI, aims to foster trustworthy AI, while the AI Giga factories, launched via a call for tenders in July 2026, are expected to unlock over €30 billion in investment to boost computing capacity and technological sovereignty. The author, a researcher from Nepal, highlights that Europe's approach treats AI as an ecosystem requiring infrastructure, research, talent, and governance, contrasting it with Nepal's AI landscape.", "body_md": "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.\n\nEuropean 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.\n\n*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.**\n\nThese 2 ambitions are inseparable. To unlock the full potential of AI, Europe must build an [ecosystem of excellence](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/ecosystem-ai-innovation-europe) that leverages its strengths in [research](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/european-ai-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.\n\nIt has several bodies or rather components that help EU to implement what has been written on paper.\n\nEstablished in June 2024, this body aims to help in:\n\nIncreasing adoption and integration across key industrial and public sectors, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by promoting AI-first strategy.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\n**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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nThese 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.\n\n**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.\n\nIt 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.\n\nThis aims to stimulate the uptake of generative AI across the EU’s key strategic industrial ecosystems.\n\nThese 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!\n\nWhat 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.\n\nThis made me look at Nepal and it’s AI ecosystem from a more informed lens.\n\nAs 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.\n\nIn Nepal, we have [**National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy, 2025**](https://mocit.gov.np/content/13111/nationalai---policy---/) 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.\n\nSome of the key areas we need to work on as a community, with strong and sustained support from the government, include:\n\nEurope 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.\n\nFor 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.\n\nThanks for reading :)\n\n*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.*\n\n[Europe Wants to Become an “AI Continent”: A Perspective from Nepal](https://pub.towardsai.net/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal-4c2097198a5a) was originally published in [Towards AI](https://pub.towardsai.net) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal", "canonical_source": "https://pub.towardsai.net/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal-4c2097198a5a?source=rss----98111c9905da---4", "published_at": "2026-09-09 02:56:06+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-09 03:20:14.730787+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["European Commission", "AI Act", "AI Giga factories", "AI Continent Action Plan", "InvestAI Facility", "Nepal"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/europe-wants-to-become-an-ai-continent-a-perspective-from-nepal.jsonld"}}