Both pots of money are to be used to promote local interests in a regional computing sector controlled by US giants.

The public funding - from taxpayers in seven European member states including Germany, France, Hungary, the Netherland, Italy, Poland and Spain - comes as AWS, Microsoft and Google continue to dominate the provision of cloud services in Europe.

Stats from Synergy Research published a year ago showed the trio had a local market share of 72 percent.

One thousand jobs are expected to be created in AI, cybersecurity, data, cloud, and software engineering.

The cash will cushion the blow from market failures, but companies developing open source software are expected to grant permissive, non-restrictive licenses to any interested party.

And if things go really well, a claw-back mechanism is in place to force companies to return part of the state aid.

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