That may be true, but there's a non zero chance that frontier AI becomes a controlled export, and that 'local' production becomes a prudent play.

Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?)

In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.

Maybe true for frontier LLM, but there's plenty of space in the niches. For example, I think their TTS/STT models are pretty good, speaking from personal experience.

They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.