About

The Great Return is a publication tracking one structural shift: the move from cloud-first to local-first AI in Europe.

It started as a research paper — The Great Return: Why 2026 Marks the Tipping Point for Local AI Migration in Europe — published in February 2026 on Zenodo. The paper identified four forces converging at the same time: geopolitics, environmental limits, hardware evolution, and the EU AI Act.

The articles here are the ongoing work: tracking events as they happen, going deeper on specific questions the paper raised, and following predictions against reality.

Ron Local

Ron Local writes on local AI infrastructure, digital sovereignty, and European technology policy. Based in Belgium.