World Summit AI 2026: what’s really at stake in keeping AI under control
On 7 and 8 October 2026, World Summit AI celebrated its tenth anniversary in Amsterdam and, for the first time, hosted a forum dedicated to sovereign AI. OVHcloud was invited to share its vision through Olivier Debeugny, CEO of OVHai LLM.
With more than 10,000 attendees and some 300 speakers, from decision-makers to researchers and technical experts, World Summit AI has established itself as one of the flagship AI events for large enterprises, startups and tech investors.
This year’s key themes included:
- The challenges of training and specialising models, and of deploying them in reliable agents, well beyond foundation models;
- Very practical questions around performance criteria and measuring the ROI of AI in production;
- Ethical questions, from human oversight of AI to its energy footprint.
At the crossroads of these themes, the question of AI control and sovereignty took centre stage this year: how and why should users, software vendors and providers stay in control of AI?
It was precisely on this topic, under the title “The Building Blocks of Sovereign AI”, that Olivier Debeugny, CEO of OVHai LLM, was invited to speak and share a few key insights:
- European AI is not just a matter of technological sovereignty. It is also about embracing a rich diversity of languages, cultures and values as the foundation for relationships between humans and agents.
- For businesses adopting AI, what is at stake is strategic autonomy: being free to choose your providers means staying in control of your data and your future.
- This European path relies on a strategic ecosystem at every layer: compute, model training, inference and applications. European champions already exist; they now need support to reach critical mass. Public procurement can lead the way.
These crucial questions echo the op-ed recently published by Octave Klaba, founder and CEO of OVHcloud, setting out OVHcloud’s position on AI Gigafactory projects. At its core, one question stands out: how can Europe turn its ambition into industrial reality, and with what economic model?