At the AI Action Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched the InvestAI initiative, aiming to mobilise €200 billion for AI investment, including a new European fund of €20 billion for AI gigafactories. This major AI infrastructure is needed to enable open, collaborative development of the most complex AI models, making Europe an AI continent.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated: “AI will improve our healthcare, spur our research and innovation, and boost our competitiveness. We want AI to be a force for good and growth. We are achieving this through our European approach – based on openness, cooperation, and excellent talent. But our approach needs to be supercharged. This is why, together with our Member States and 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 large models needed to make Europe an AI continent.”
President of the European Investment Bank, Nadia Calviño, commented: “Together with the EU Commission, the EIB Group is stepping up support for artificial intelligence, a key driver of innovation and productivity in Europe.”
The EUs InvestAI fund will finance four future AI gigafactories across the EU. The new AI gigafactories will specialise 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, about four times more than the AI factories currently being set up.
The gigafactories funded through InvestAI will be the largest public-private partnership globally for the development of trustworthy AI. They will serve the European model of cooperative, open innovation, focusing on complex industrial and mission-critical applications. The goal is for every company, not just the largest players, to access large-scale computing power to build the future.
InvestAI will include a layered fund, with shares of different risk and return profiles. The EU budget would de-risk the investment of other partners. The Commissions initial funding for InvestAI will come from existing EU funding programmes with a digital component, such as the Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe, and InvestEU. 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 Member States, is already the largest public investment in AI worldwide and will unlock over ten times more private investment. It already provides massive access for start-ups and industry to supercomputers.
Background
Alongside the InvestAI fund launched today, the Commission is taking many actions in different fields to support AI innovation in Europe. AI Factories are a highlight of the Commissions AI innovation package presented in January 2024, together with:
- Financial support through Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe programme dedicated to generative AI;
- Accompanying initiatives to strengthen the EUs generative AI talent pool through education, training, skilling, and reskilling activities;
- Further encouragement of public and private investments in AI start-ups and scale-ups, including through venture capital or equity support;
- The acceleration of the development and deployment of Common European Data Spaces, made available to the AI community, for whom data is a key resource to train and improve their models;
- The ‘GenAI4EU initiative, which aims to support the development of novel use cases and emerging applications in Europes 14 industrial ecosystems, as well as the public sector. Application areas include robotics, health, biotech, manufacturing, mobility, climate, and virtual worlds.
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 Commission will launch an ‘Apply AI initiative to drive industrial adoption of artificial intelligence in key sectors.