> Providers can just run them, offer cheap tokens, and pocket the margin.

There’s an assumption that you can spin up the infra and acquire customers within that margin

Which is not unreasonable. Just hosting it in the EU and promising not to retain / sell the data let's you charge a healthy extra and compete in many areas other players can't.

> Just hosting it in the EU and promising not to retain / sell the data let's you charge a healthy extra and compete in many areas other players can't.

It's been a few years. Has anyone done this successfully yet?

There are a over a dozen EU open-weight providers. I’m not sure if they are even charging that much of an extra. EU-based clients have little reason to use non-EU inference providers.

> EU-based clients have little reason to use non-EU inference providers.

Which models are most popular in Europe?

I don’t have user statistics but my mail/domain registrar Infomaniak advertises Qwen 3.5 and Apertus, “a Swiss open-source AI model, developed by EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS”

https://euria.infomaniak.com/

melious.ai comes to mind.

Keeping SLAs spinning isn’t this trivial

> There’s an assumption that you can spin up the infra and acquire customers within that margin

Only Nvidia and approved friends can at the moment. Nvidia can even backstop your loan required.