The programme includes a new 20 billion European fund for the AI gigafactories and provides investors with different risk – returns profiles.
Speaking during the Paris Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, On 12 February, Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU Commission launched InvestAI, a 200 billion euros worth programme for the investments in Artificial Intelligence. As part of such initiative, the Commission also created an European 20 billion fund for the development of AI gigafactories (see here the press release, here the video of Ursula von der Leyen statement and here the text). This vehicle will be a Public Private Partnership (PPP) offering different risk-return profiles.
Von der Leyen said: “The AI will improve our Healthcare systems, as well as incentivizing the science research, innovation and improve our competitivity. We want AI to support good and growth, that’s why we are keeping a European approach based on openness, cooperation and excellent talents. However, we still need to improve. For such a reason the EU and its partners will allocate unprecedented capitals through InvestAI for the European gigafactories. This unique PPP, akin to a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) for AI, will allow European scientists, corporates and smaller companies to develop advanced models for making Europe a continent for AI.”
Nadia Calviño, the chairwoman of the European Investments Bank (EIB), added: “The EU Commissiona and the EIB are offering their keen support to the AI sector, a key driver for innovation and productivity in Europe”.
InvestAI will finance the development of four EU-based AI gigafactories that will focus on big size and complex models that require an extensive computing infrastructure to achieve breakthroughs in specific fields such as medicine or science. Such sites will have 100000 last generation AI chips, four times the number of the current plants.
The assets that will attract InvestAI resources will be the world’s largest PPP for the development of reliable AI. They will be consistent with the European model of open and cooperative innovation, with a focus on complex, mission-critical industrial applications. The goal is to grant access to large-scale computing power for every company, not just the largest.
Furthermore, the EU Commission already announced last December that it will support seven AI factories (see here the press release) and will soon make a statement about the next five. In this first round, EU and national funds will invest a total of 1.5 billion. Half of the amount will come from Digital Europe Programme for AI infrastructure e Horizon Europe for AIF services. The seven selected factories are: BSC AIF based at Barcelona Supercomputing Centre; IT4LIA based at CINECA – Bologna Tecnopolo; LUMI AIF at CSC in Kajaani, Finland; Meluxina-AI at LuxProvide in Bissen, Luxembourg; MIMER at Linköping University in Sweden; HammerHAI at the University of Stuttgart in Germany; and Pharos at GRNET in Athens, Greece.
The Commission is undertaking many actions in different areas to support innovation in this field. AI factories are one of the highlights of the AI Innovation plans. However, in January 2024, the Commission also announced:
– Financial support to generative AI through Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe programme that will enhance initiatives to strengthen the EU talent pool in this field through education, training, qualification and retraining activities;
– further encouragement of public and private investment in AI start-ups and scale-ups, through venture capital or equity support;
– accelerating the development and deployment of common European data spaces, made available to the AI community, for whom data are a key resource for training and improving their models;
– the GenAI4EU initiative, which aims to support the development of new use cases and emerging applications in Europe’s 14 industrial ecosystems and the public sector. Application areas include robotics, health, biotechnology, manufacturing, mobility, climate and virtual worlds.
The current support for AI factories, amounting to 10 billion and including the resources of the EU and Member States, is already the world largest public sector investment and will leverage more than ten times the private investment. The support already provides start-ups and industry with massive access to supercomputers.
In the last months, several firms and institutions announced investments of hundreds of billions in AI and the development of related infrastructures. During the Paris summit, France as well announced a 109 billion investment programme that includes the resources of Brookfield Asset Management (20 billion) and MGX, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund for the sector (30-50 billion) (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
In January 2025, Sofbank and OpenAi announced a joint project with the blessing of the Japanese government (see here a previous post by BeBeez). In January 2025, OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle and other co-investors also announced the 500 billion US Dollars Stargate Project, to which the Trump administration gave its support (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
In October 2024, CDP Venture Capital signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI to promote the development, commercialisation and adoption of artificial intelligence technologies in Italy (see here a previous post by BeBeez). In March 2024, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that CDP Venture Capital would invest one billion euros in artificial intelligence (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
In April 2024, CDP Venture Capital presented its 2024-2028 business plan and provided the details about the vehicles that it was going to launch. CDP explained that it would allocate 500 million for Fondo Artificial Intelligence (fka CDP VC Deep Tech AI/Cyber) and 500 million for six vertical vehicles for strategic sectors such as space, infrastructures and transports; environmental technologiee and clean energy; industry; healthcare and life science; and agrifood (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
