I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-c...
I just looked at Scaleway’s pricing for two popular open source models (gpt-oss-120b and qwen3.5-397b) and it’s meaningfully more expensive than alternatives (e.g., many you’d find on OpenRouter).