Today, at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched the InvestAI initiative to mobilise €200 billion in AI investment, including a new €20 billion European fund for AI gigafactories.

This large infrastructure is needed to enable open and collaborative development of the most sophisticated models and to make Europe a continent leader in AI.

"Our goal is to mobilise a total of €200 billion for AI investment in Europe," stated European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the AI Summit in Paris.

She said the EU would contribute €50 billion, with the rest coming from "suppliers, investors and industry". 

Europe faces a tough challenge as the US and China advance in AI, but Von der Leyen insisted that "the AI race is far from over".

"We want to accelerate innovation," she noted. According to her, "global leadership is still in the process of being won".

The EU investment will include €20 billion to fund four giant AI factories "to enable open co-development of the most sophisticated AI models", the Commission said in a statement.

Initial EU funding will come from existing programmes with a digital component.

Von der Leyen said the EU funds would "complement" pledges from a group of more than 60 European companies, such as Airbus, Volkswagen and Mistral AI.

On 10 February, the firms said they aimed to stimulate the emergence of new companies by having international investors "earmark" €150 billion for AI-related opportunities in Europe over five years under the EU's "AI Champions" initiative.

The Commission President also announced that the EU will make its public supercomputers "available to our best start-ups and scientists".

"We want AI to be a force for good. AI needs competition, but AI also needs collaboration," she pointed out.

The EU chief took to the stage in Paris just after US Vice President JD Vance took aim at the bloc, warning that "over-regulation" could kill the burgeoning AI sector.

"AI needs people's trust and needs to be safe," said Von der Leyen, defending the bloc's landmark AI Act regulating the technology, which includes restrictions on uses deemed too dangerous.

"Safety is in the interest of business," she explained, while acknowledging that "we need to make it easier, cut red tape." 

InvestAI's fund will finance four future AI megafactories across the EU. They will specialise in training the most complex, very large AI models. Such next-generation models require extensive computing infrastructure for breakthroughs in specific fields such as medicine or science. The Gigafactories will have around 100,000 last-generation chips, about four times as many as the AI factories currently being set up.

The Gigafactories, funded through InvestAI, will be the world's largest public-private partnership to develop reliable AI. They will serve the European model of open innovation collaboration, with a focus on complex industrial and critical applications. The aim is for every company, not just the biggest players, to have access to large-scale computing power to build the future. | BGNES