Mr. President,
dear Emmanuel,
Fellow leaders,
Dear representatives of European industries.
Thank you for this opportunity to collaborate. Europe is one of the largest digital markets in the world. We deliver excellent and safe products daily, such as medicines, planes, cars, and telecommunication systems.
We provide clean energy and have delivered life-saving vaccines to get the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we will also excel in AI.
Today, the CEOs of the most dynamic AI companies in Europe are here. Lets start by looking at the strengths of our AI ecosystem before discussing how we can grow further.
The start-up scene in Europe is booming. The number of AI companies that became unicorns has increased tenfold in recent years. We have a unique and strong industrial base and a tremendous wealth of data. But we must put these assets to good use!
We want AI to be trained with high-quality data from industry and public sector cooperation. That is why we have created talent and computing networks, the AI factories. Here, our best scientists and start-ups have access to our world-class supercomputers to develop the AI we need.
We have established 12 AI factories in just a few months. 7 are already operational, and the other 5 are in development. This is the largest public investment in AI globally, and our goal is for it to multiply.
Some European AI companies are already specializing in business applications. Innovative companies like Mistral and Helsing are developing products for specific business needs, such as customer service and intelligent drones.
These applications may not make headlines daily, but they are improving the productivity of industries across Europe. But we know this is not enough.
Our start-ups need resources to scale up, and we are far from widespread AI adoption in our economy and society. That is why we are moving to the next level. We want to expand our model of open cooperation to host frontier innovation in AI.
As AI requires massive computational capacity, the next step will be to launch AI Giga-factories. Very large data and computing networks to train very large models. With our European Gigafactories, computational power wont be a monopoly of a few but a service accessible to all.
Some time ago, I launched the idea of a CERN for AI. For AI, we need full private sector involvement in our gigafactories. And we need more capital to make it happen. We will discuss this tomorrow.
Today, I want to emphasize our approach to give researchers and start-ups unique access to top-notch computing infrastructure. This will enable industries to share and federate their data. It will allow hospitals to safely train models based on their data and enable unprecedented advances in science and climate modeling. Like CERN, which attracts scientists from all over the world, our gigafactories will be open to the best talents. Because Europe is open for collaboration.
The development of AI for public good requires not just competition but also collaboration. Europe has a long tradition of sharing knowledge and research. This is the European way.
Thank you.