The Pravets plant bought ready-made modules from Taiwan with dollars, assembled computers and sold them to the Soviet Union for rubles. You can't buy the next components with rubles. So the bill didn't come out even before the borders fell.
This is what Daniel Lorer recalls on "Facebook".
I think of this every time I hear about "European technological sovereignty".
On August 11, the French Mistral, the European answer to OpenAI, announced that it was releasing the first foreign model on its servers - the Chinese GLM of Z.AI. In the original, without any changes. Their technical director explained it simply: the model is good, everyone likes it, it is open and there is no good reason not to they do.
And he is right.
In the same message, Olivier Sichel from the French state financial institution Caisse des Dépópôts said: „Innovation without dependence on foreign players is imperative for Europe.”
I read it twice. That's what it says.
Today, at the top of artificial intelligence, there are only American and Chinese models. There are no European ones. Even Mistral's is trained by them, but it is based on the Chinese DeepSeek.
Mistral is doing exactly what a good company should do. The problem is the environment around it.
In Europe, we have excellent engineers and 27 separate markets. The International Monetary Fund has calculated that our internal barriers weigh as much as a 44% tariff on goods and 110% on services.
The chips for artificial intelligence are paid for by world price in dollars. Revenues are collected piecemeal, country by country. The same account as with Pravets, only with open borders..
And the money is not enough. 1 Gw of computing power costs about 38 billion dollars according to Epoch AI calculations - 1/3 of everything produced in Bulgaria in 1 year. Mistral has collected only 4 billion and is already selling capacity that it has not yet built.
In March, the Commission proposed EU Inc. - common rules under which a company can operate throughout the EU, instead of struggling with 27 legal systems. EU leaders set a deadline of the end of 2026. On May 28, several countries requested that labor rules remain national. Bulgaria said nothing.
On September 24, there will be a new debate in the Council. Will anyone from there go with a Bulgarian position — and what?
Because European artificial intelligence without a common European market is Pravets for 38 billion.