We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
How do you define biggest? Can't be by market cap.
Market caps of Russian examples from above:
Sber: $84 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/sberbank/marketcap/
Yandex: RUB 1327B (~= $17 bn) - https://tradingeconomics.com/yndx:rm:market-capitalization
VK: RUB 176.7B (~= $2.3 bn) - https://smart-lab.ru/q/VKCO/MSFO/market_cap/en/
Ozon: $8.9 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/ozon/marketcap/
Market caps of bigger EU tech firms:
ASML: $533.84 B
Siemens: $223.14 B
SAP: $202.96 B
Seagate Technology: $164.43 B
The EU hasn't because European investors are shy about deploying capital. If you look at European weapons and aerospace, it's clear there's no particular technical or capability barrier.
Even in 2019, some coworkers were complaining that the best offer from their landline company (in one of the small villages just outside the Berlin city limits) was dialup.
Berlin's reputation post reunification has been "poor but sexy".
We've repeatedly built things, they often get bought by US companies. This doesn't necessarily even involve them moving office, as for example Deep Mind was founded in the UK (while it was in the EU) and is still there (HQ: London; research offices in France & Germany so still in EU too) despite now being owned by Alphabet.
We have, they get bought by American companies as their exit strategy.
If American companies decide to shutdown access then there's no pressure from the behemoths to stamp out competition, it would just be natural that alternatives take over since the market clearly exists and without American tech companies filling that market it would be pretty easy for alternatives to grow.
Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.
Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.