Keynotes
European Sovereign AI – Building Local Ecosystems for Resilience & Competitiveness
VENUE
Dr. Michael P. Unger, Lead Sovereign AI Initiatives & Financial Services (Central Europe), NVIDIA Europe has the engineering. The industry. The data. What it needs now is the infrastructure to turn that into intelligence - at scale, under its own control. The shift from AI in apps to Physical AI embedded in factories, machines, and critical systems is where Europe’s generational industrial advantage meets its defining moment. The question is whether that intelligence compounds locally or is captured elsewhere. In this keynote, Michael Unger maps the five layers every nation needs, from energy and chips to models and applications - to move from AI consumer to AI maker, and why the ecosystems built now will define European competitiveness for the next decade. Michael specializes in the intersection of AI and local value creation, drawing on an extensive background in strategy consulting and global tech transformation. His work focuses on securing long-term regional competitiveness by strategically locating and developing AI ecosystems.
TRAVEL OPTIONS
Apertus: Democratising the Foundation for Global Sovereign AI
Imanol Schlag, AI Research Scientist at the ETH AI Center, introduces Apertus—a fully transparent large language model developed through collaboration between EPFL, ETH Zürich, and CSCS. The initiative responds to opaque training data, limited multilingual representation, and proprietary control by demonstrating how public research institutions can build competitive language models with copyright-compliant public data, stringent ethical standards, and support for more than 1,000 languages.