EU is chipping in €200B to enlarge its AI infrastructure

During the final day of the AI Action Summit, the President of the European Commission announced InvestAI, an initiative that involves around €200 billion to increase Europe’s artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
“AI will improve our healthcare, spur our research and innovation and boost our competitiveness. We want AI to be a force for good and for growth. We are doing this through our own European approach, based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent. But our approach still needs to be supercharged,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.
One of the EU’s plans is to build four so-called ‘AI gigafactories’, facilities that are specialized in training very large and complex AI models. They will have around 100,000 last-generation AI chips, which is approximately four times the amount current AI factories have.
A new European fund of €20 billion has been created to fund the construction of these AI gigafactories and is considered to be the largest public-private partnership in the world to develop trustworthy AI. The goal is to give both small and big companies and organizations access to large-scale computing power.
The AI gigafactories are part of the European Commission’s AI Innovation Package, that was presented in January 2024. The Commission will also set up a European AI Research Council where Europe can pool resources and explore how it can exploit the untapped potential of data to support AI and other technologies.
Later this year the European Commission will launch an ‘Apply AI’ initiative to persuade key sectors to adopt AI in their day-to-day business.
Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, called the announcement of InvestAI ‘a historical day’.
“By putting together our resources, we will enable AI entrepreneurs to innovate and scale up in the most demanding fields of AI. We will be ready to lead the way on AI with the state-of-the-art infrastructure,” she said.
The announcement of InvestAI follows the proclamation of President Emmanuel Macron to invest €109 billion in numerous AI projects in France.
In January, an American alliance called The Stargate Project, which includes OpenAI, Oracle, Arm, Microsoft and NVIDIA, declared to invest $500 billion over the next four years in revamping the AI infrastructure in the United States.
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