The European Commission unveiled on Tuesday at the Paris AI Action Summit an initiative to mobilise €200bn for AI, including a €50bn investment from the EU alongside €150bn in funding from private investors.
Earlier in the week week, dozens of corporates, VC firms and startups put their weight behind a new €150bn “EU AI Champions Initiative,” led by US VC General Catalyst, calling for simplified European regulation, more investment in infrastructure and a campaign to increase understanding of technology among the public.
The EU’s initiative, dubbed InvestAI, will “top up” the EU AI Champions’s commitment by €50bn. “It will be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI,” Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech during the summit.
InvestAI funds include a new €20bn fund for AI gigafactories. They will be used to back four future AI gigafactories focused on training the most complex and largest AI models, with around 100k last-generation AI chips, according to a press release. The goal is for companies big and small in the EU to access large-scale computing power, it said. It will fund the gigafactories through a mix of grants and equity.
“We are doing this through our own European approach — based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent. But our approach still needs to be supercharged,” von der Leyen said in a statement. “This unique public-private partnership, akin to a CERN for AI [European Organization for Nuclear Research] 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 initiative will include a layered fund with different risk and return profiles, with the EU budget “derisking” the investment of its other partners, according to the Commission. Initial funding for the initiative will come from existing EU programmes like the Digital Europe Programme, InvestEU and Horizon Europe; member states are also able to contribute by programming funds.
The move comes at a time when European countries are ramping up their AI commitments as the competitive pressure heats up between Europe and the US and China — the latter two gaining in the AI race.
French president Emmanuel Macron recently announced the country will funnel €109bn into AI investments over the next five years.
The InvestAI initiative also comes alongside the EU’s new so-called ‘competitiveness compass’ — a strategy aimed at making the EU, long decried for having an onerous emphasis on regulation over innovation, more competitive.
Update, February 12, 2025: This article has been amended to reflect that the €200bn investment is divided between EU funds and the EU AI Champions initiative.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/eu-invest-ai-initiative-news/
