European Sovereign Compute for Defence AI

European military AI sovereignty cannot be assessed only at the level of models, algorithms or defence applications. Its first constraint is compute.

Training, fine-tuning, deploying and operating AI systems for defence require access to processors, accelerators, memory architectures, interconnects, software stacks, high-performance computing infrastructure, secure data-centre capacity and edge-inference hardware that can be governed under European strategic, industrial and security priorities.

This analysis answers: Why is compute the first constraint on European military-AI sovereignty? How do the European Chips Act, EuroHPC, JUPITER and the AI Factories address the compute-sovereignty problem? What role do European processor and accelerator efforts such as SiPearl, Axelera, VSORA, Openchip and Kalray, and ASML's lithography leverage, play? What dependencies, choke points and strategic scenarios shape the sovereign-compute map from HPC to tactical edge?