> the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation
Depends what you mean. The academic work seems largely... fine? Plenty of good work came out of Europe or European researchers. It seems the problem is more "trying to build a trillion-dollar company of any kind".
It's an interesting question: does the EU seek only to regulate successful modern American companies to death, or home grown ones too? Probably not a gamble worth taking.
The issue with EU is its not one market, for funding or deploying a company of any kind. There is both no funding scale and no easy distribution scale. Same thing with any kind of lobbying you need to do to move laws to be more amenable to tech, you have to do it 20+ times. Nobody does this, which is why smart EU and UK talent migrates to the US, scales, then just uses the weight of their US business to change reality around them in the EU anwyay. For the most part.
Something commercial? Mistral is the only significant European LLM I'm aware of, and it's not frontier level. Then a dearth of EU-owned hyperscalers, AI-focussed data centers, GPU/CPU/memory manufacturers, even cheap energy...?