It was in reaction to the possible threat of main actors restricting use. The latest US gov stunt with Fable just made it concrete and pressing.

Sovereignty is a political buzzword. From the political point of view, you want your country to be as independent as possible. This means you need the capabilities to build and deploy good AI models. Initiatives like this are more about capability-building and less about LLM-building.

Why do we need capabilities in Europe? Because Trump and Xi can't be trusted to keep providing us with new frontier models in the next years.