European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen launched the EU’s ‘InvestAI’ initiative at the AI Action Summit in Paris Tuesday, intended to mobilise €200 billion for investment in Artificial Intelligence.
A new European fund of €20 billion for AI gigafactories, will create a large AI infrastructure to allow open, collaborative development of the most complex AI models and to make Europe an AI continent, says the Commission.
The European approach will be based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent, said the Commission president: “But our approach still needs to be supercharged. This is why, together with our Member States and with our partners, we will mobilise unprecedented capital through InvestAI for European AI gigafactories. This unique public-private partnership, akin to a CERN for AI, will enable all our scientists and companies – not just the biggest – to develop the most advanced very large models needed to make Europe an AI continent.”
The EU’s InvestAI fund will finance four future AI gigafactories across the EU. The gigafactories will be specialised in training the most complex, very large, AI models. Such next-generation models require extensive computing infrastructure for breakthroughs in specific domains such as medicine or science. The gigafactories will have around 100,000 last-generation AI chips, around four times more than the AI factories being set up right now.
The gigafactories funded through InvestAI will be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI. They will serve the European model of cooperative, open innovation, with a focus on complex industrial and mission-critical applications. The goal is that every company, not only the biggest players, can access large-scale computing power to build the future.
InvestAI will include a layered fund, with shares of different risk and return profiles, says the Commission. The EU budget would ‘derisk’ the investment of other partners. The Commission’s initial funding for InvestAI will come from existing EU funding programmes which have a digital component, such as Digital Europe Programme and Horizon Europe, and InvestEU. EU Member States can also contribute by programming funds from their Cohesion envelopes. Funding of AI gigafactories with a mix of grants and equity will serve as one of the pilot cases for strategic technologies announced in the Competitiveness Compass.
The Commission has already announced the initial seven AI factories in December and will soon announce the next five. The existing support for AI Factories of €10 billion, co-financed by the EU and the Member States, is already the largest public investment in AI in the world, and will unlock over ten times more private investment. It already provides massive access for start-ups and industry to supercomputers.
