In Europe, nations are feeling pressure to keep the continent competitive in AI while staying inside strict privacy rules and reinforcing European data sovereignty. In November 2025, the European Commission launched RAISE, the Resource for AI Science in Europe — a virtual institute to coordinate AI resources, including scientific datasets, across member states. These resources will come largely from Horizon Europe, the EU’s €93.5 billion research and innovation framework.
According to the Commission, databases such as Europe’s Genomic Data Infrastructure and Cancer Image Europe will now be harnessed to serve planned public–private ‘AI gigafactories’ that will enable advanced AI modeling. Horizon Europe will channel €600 million to secure compute time for researchers.
But data sovereignty has a sharp edge. Fu says the mood in Brussels is defensive. She thinks that European Commission officials are embarrassed about having allowed Chinese AI developers to plunder European biomedical databases, even while China blocks foreign access to Chinese datasets. They are now belatedly closing international access to biomedical databases, after years of championing cross-border sharing, says Fu. “They now care more about local data control instead of the globalization of science,” she worries.
The Commission declined interview requests with its health data officials but says that it supports the “mapping and mobilizing of health and medical data across the EU to advance AI in healthcare”. In February, a spokesperson for the Commission said that despite some allowance for third-country access, “there are currently no partnerships involving the sharing of such data with China or the United States for AI development”.
A Data Union strategy launched by the Commission last year aims to strengthen Europe’s data sovereignty and includes an ‘anti-leakage toolbox’ and guidelines to assess “fair treatment of EU data abroad”. But so far, the Commission has released no details about these measures and says that publications describing them will only be issued later this year.
“Europe is building an AI data ecosystem that is predominantly publicly governed, interoperable and regulated, even though ‘public’ does not mean open access,” says Antonio Lavvechia, professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Napoli in Italy.
“Data are available for AI development, but only through controlled, application-based mechanisms,” Lavvechia explains. With respect to the interchange of healthcare and biomedical data between European and Chinese researchers, Lavecchia describes a “hybrid picture in which data sovereignty and protection laws restrict direct access, while scientific partnerships and shared frameworks create channels for meaningful exchange”.
Europe’s new emphasis on sovereignty is filtering into research funding. During a Horizon Europe call-for-funding webinar in late January, project managers explained that “Europe is at an economical and geopolitical conjuncture where we have to pay attention to what we do and who we collaborate with.” Under some calls for funding, applicants are told they may be asked to show they can “prove that none of the applicants involved in the project is controlled by China”.
For scientists like Fu running cohort studies and biobanks, the implication is that decisions around data access are no longer primarily scientific. They are geopolitical, and opaque.
“We have to report if we are collaborating with China or other countries on AI,” Fu says about her university’s rules under European Commission regulations. “But nobody tells us, what are the consequences? Why we should collaborate, or not collaborate? Nobody’s able to give an answer.”