EU launches InvestAI initiative to mobilise €200 billion of investment in artificial intelligence

This article is brought to you in association with the European Commission.

Today, at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has launched InvestAI, an initiative to mobilise €200 billion for investment in AI, including a new European fund of €20 billion for AI gigafactories. This large AI infrastructure is needed to allow open, collaborative development of the most complex AI models and to make Europe an AI continent.  

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “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, akin to a CERN for AI, 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.” 

President of the European Investment Bank, Nadia Calviño, said: “Together with the EU Commission, the EIB Group is stepping up support for Artificial Intelligence, a key driver of innovation and productivity in Europe.”

The EU’s InvestAI fund will finance four future AI gigafactories across the EU. The new AI gigafactories will be specialised in training the most complex, very large, AI models. Such next-generation models require extensive computing infrastructure for breakthroughs in specific domains such as medicine or science. The gigafactories will have around 100 000 last-generation AI chips, around four times more than the AI factories being set up right now.

The gigafactories funded through InvestAI will be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI. They will serve the European model of cooperative, open innovation, with a focus on complex industrial and mission-critical applications. The goal is that every company, not only the biggest players, can access large-scale computing power to build the future.

InvestAI will include a layered fund, with shares of different risk and return profiles. The EU budget would derisk the investment of other partners. The Commission’s initial funding for InvestAI will come from existing EU funding programmes which have a digital component, such as Digital Europe Programme and Horizon Europe, and InvestEU. Member States can also contribute by programming funds from their Cohesion envelopes. Funding of AI gigafactories with a mix of grants and equity will serve as one of the pilot cases for strategic technologies announced in the Competitiveness Compass.

The Commission has already announced the initial seven AI factories in December and will soon announce the next five. The existing support for AI Factories of €10 billion, co-financed by the EU and the Member States, is already the largest public investment in AI in the world, and will unlock over ten times more private investment. It already provides massive access for start-ups and industry to supercomputers.

Background

Next to the InvestAI fund launched today, the Commission is taking many actions in different fields to support AI innovation in Europe. AI Factories are a highlight of the Commission’s AI innovation package presented in January 2024, together with:

• Financial support  through Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe programme dedicated to generative AI;
• Accompanying initiatives to strengthen the EU’s generative AI talent pool through education, training, skilling and reskilling activities;
• Further encouragement of public and private investments in AI start-ups and scale-ups, including through venture capital or equity support;
• The acceleration of the development and deployment of Common European Data Spaces, made available to the AI community, for whom data is a key resource to train and improve their models;
• The ‘GenAI4EU‘ initiative, which aims to support the development of novel use cases and emerging applications in Europe’s 14 industrial ecosystems, as well as the public sector. Application areas include robotics, health, biotech, manufacturing, mobility, climate and virtual worlds.

The Commission will also 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. Later this year, the Commission will launch an ‘Apply AI’ initiative to drive industrial adoption of artificial intelligence in key sectors.

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