It raises to prominence after becoming a Google wholly owned subdiary. I have repeated multiple times in other comments that DeepMind's success is at least built on top of Google's tech and capital.
Interesringly, Google's tech infrastructure were blueprinted by a lot of pioneers and two of the most well known are Urs Hozle and Luiz André Barroso both are of Eu descentdent.
There is no evidence that whatever DeepMind did can be done with another EU partner. Or even anyone who is not Google, largely thanks to Larry and Sergey's personal tastes and experience. I doubt Msft or Amazon have the right culture for DeepMind.
The whole alphabet thing was engineered to allow independency. So that, among other things, a more pure research org can work without the ever encroaching of the profit driven hands inside Google. Mind you, DeepMind absolutely put itself above Google, or at least firmly distance itself from Google, GCP once proposed to use DeepMind brand in marketing materials, and was sharply rejected citing "conflicting brand images".
Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the structure of EU decision making.
Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as domestic industries.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...