At the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has launched InvestAI, a new initiative to mobilise €200 billion for AI investment. A key component of this initiative is the creation of a €20 billion European fund dedicated to developing AI gigafactories - large AI infrastructure designed to allow open and collaborative development of the most complex AI models. The goal of the InvestAI programme is to position Europe as a leader in AI innovation.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen shared: “AI will improve our healthcare, spur our research and innovation and boost our competitiveness. We want AI to be a force for good and for growth. We are doing this through our own European approach – based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent. But our approach still needs to be supercharged. This is why, together with our Member States and with our partners, we will mobilise unprecedented capital through InvestAI for European AI gigafactories. This unique public-private partnership 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 EU's InvestAI fund will finance the construction of four future AI gigafactories across the EU. The new AI gigafactories will be specialised in training the most complex and largest AI models. The applications will range from medical breakthroughs to scientific research. Each gigafactory will have around 100,000 advanced AI chips, which is four times as many as in current AI facilities. The gigafactories funded through InvestAI will be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI and will serve the European model of cooperative, open innovation.
The Commission's initial funding for InvestAI will come from existing EU funding programmes which have a digital component, such as Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe and InvestEU. The AI gigafactories will be funded through a combination of grants and equity investments, and serve as a pilot project for strategic technologies as outlined in the Competitive Compass - a recently announced EU roadmap for generating growth opportunities in the EU over the next five years.
Background
AI gigafactories are a key element of the AI Innovation Package, launched by the Commission in January 2024. Other initiatives include strengthening the generative AI talent pool through education, training, and upskilling programs; equity support for AI start-ups and scale-ups to encourage private and public investment; and the ‘Apply AI’ initiative, designed to drive AI adoption in key industrial sectors. The Commission also plans to 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.
Europe is still lagging behind when it comes to AI, especially in comparison with the US. Both the government and venture capitalists have been investing hundreds of billions in the sector there for years. As a result, American companies dominate the market, and the most widely used AI products in Europe – such as ChatGPT from OpenAI – are mainly of American origin.
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