Energy-wise, the European alternative is more likely to be closer to sustainable. Also, the water stress may look different in some European countries. Scandinavia has been experimenting a lot with transferring heat from data centers to district heating systems. I don't think they would care much about that in US (you need district heating, first of all...).

Solidagent is a good in-between option, they run global state-of-art "open source" models on EU-located servers. Regardless how open they are, models like Deepseek are much more sustainable to walled gardens of Big Tech (not to mention that Deepseek actually used less resources to achieve similar performance).

And as others said, MistralAI also works well.

[–] Szewek@sopuli.xyz 2 points 7 hours ago

Of course, overconsumption of everything is wasteful, by definition. I get other people's critique. You don't need AI to tell you what to eat for breakfast, and you will be better off sharing your worries with a human. You might write better code yourself in many cases, it's usually worth trying (and search for help once needed). But LLMs are tools, and there is plenty of proper use for them.