It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google".

Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).