I think there's nothing special about public funding though. The field is so competitive that people will be mad if a competitive model is not achieved, making corruption more damaging to the organizations. There would also be some internal competition. There are after all several EU LLM/AI/etc. firms that would probably try to use this infrastructure.
I guarantee you that maybe people would get mad that no competitive model is achieved because the politicians burned the tax payers money. But there would be no repercussions, nobody would be held accountable and would just be marked as a failed project.
Some sort of alternative must be created, after all, since models are being restricted to the US only.
But no, lets make this a 10B deal who someone will suck out 1B out of it even before its shipped