The European Union will mobilize 200,000 million euros For artificial intelligence (AI) with the contribution of public money that will be added to the 150,000 million committed by a group of European companies, as the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen announced on Tuesday.
In his speech on the last day of the Summit on the artificial intelligence of Paris, von der Leyen explained that the European Investment Initiative will complete the investments of the more than 60 companies that have launched the European AI Champions initiative. “Computational power requires an immediate substantial financial capital,” said Von der Leyen to justify this mass contribution of public money.
This 200,000 million euro package for AI Includes a new European fund of 20,000 million for gigafactoriesinfrastructure that are considered necessary to allow the new more complex models of this technology to develop in open and collaboratively.
That fund will serve for the Construction of four of those gigafactories in the European Unionthat will be specialized in training of future models that require greater computer infrastructure to achieve advances in specific domains such as medicine or science and will have about 100,000 last generation chips.
Von der Leyen struggled to Defer the idea that the European Union has already lost the race for the AI led by the United States and, at a distance, China. “I do not agree, because that race has only started,” he said, before stressing that the adoption of this technology in many areas is in an initial phase.
Said that “We want Europe to be one of the leaders in AI“, but not replicating what the other great powers do, but with their” own approach “and that means” investing in what we know how to do our best “, the science and technology it controls.
In that regard, he pointed out that the EU must focus on complex applications That you use your industrial technology, your data and your knowledge and its development must be done in a “cooperative” way, so that it meets “talents from different countries, sectors and origins”, following the cooperative model that has given such good results in the science. He also defended a European AI that settles in the open source because that allows “to advance much faster” than when it is the exclusive property of a company.
That is why the president of the European Commission said that the objective is that all companies, and not only the largest, have Access to the calculation power they need to put their projects into practice and that the new superculators They pass to a higher scale so that great models can be trained with them.
He recalled that In a few months, 12 AI factories have been launched with an investment of 10,000 million euros, of which 7 are already in operation and the other five under construction. It is currently, he said, “the greatest public investment in the world and our intention is to sow and multiply.”
In a statement, the president of the European Investment Bank (BEI), Nadia Calviño, congratulated the joint initiative of the agency he directs with the European Commission to put public money in artificial intelligence, “a key engine of innovation and the productivity in Europe. “
