European Commission moves forward with “AI factories” – Euractiv

The European Commission has launched a drive to facilitate the creation of data centres for artificial intelligence (AI), which are essential to boosting the EU’s global competitiveness.

According to the Commission, AI Factories will provide the computing power, data and talent needed to develop and test AI models for startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and researchers.

“If the EU wants to compete with China or the US, we need to act quickly (in creating AI factories),” a Commission spokesperson told Euractiv in June.

Last Friday (26 July) The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), a joint initiative of the EU and European countries to develop and operate supercomputers, has changed its statutes. Work programme to pave the way for AI factories.

EuroHPC JU also announced that the recruitment of candidates to organize the AI ​​factory will begin on September 9, two months after the original deadline.

A Commission spokesman said the first call for applications for AI factories was “expected” to be published in July 2024, with the factories expected to be operational by mid-2025.

The Commission and EuroHPC JU have not jointly set a specific timetable for the launch of the first AI factories.

European scientists already have access to large supercomputers through EuroHPC access connections, which already include a call for “AI and data-intensive projects”. With the AI ​​factories, the Commission wants to expand access and build new data centres specialised in AI for the EuroHPC stack.

“The main target is startups and SMEs,” the spokesman said.

Member States can apply to set up an AI factory. The EU will provide 50% of the funding, with the remaining funds provided by participating countries.

Once launched, EuroHPC JU will allocate half of the computing resources, likely via an updated Access Policywhile the participating countries will manage the other half as they see fit. Companies or research groups wishing to use the AI ​​Factory can apply via the EuroHPC JU or via a participating Member State.

Transformation of Digital Europe and Horizon Europe funds

The current maximum budget for AI factories is €1.96 billion, which is less than originally estimated 2.1 billion euros.

Each budget line is subject to the availability of funds and the Commission will only spend an amount equivalent to the funds allocated by the participating countries.

Up to €800 million of Commission funding will come from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP). It will be used to acquire new AI-specific computing resources or upgrade existing facilities.

Up to €180 million will be allocated to the establishment and operation of AI Factories under Horizon Europe (HE), including the development of an experimental computing platform optimised for AI.

Up to €400 million of DEP funds will be allocated from 2025 onwards, with the remainder to be allocated by 2027.

AI factories are part of AI Innovation Package The move was announced in January, in line with a broader Commission initiative to increase total EU spending on AI to €20 billion per year by 2030, including private investment.

The EU executive has proposed an investment plan in 2021after which it already spends over €1 billion per year from the DEP and HE budgets.

It is unclear how the AI ​​factories will interact with other initiatives aimed at helping companies implement AI, such as the European Digital Innovation Centers, Test and experimental facilities, this regulatory sandboxes required by the Artificial Intelligence Act or the recently advertised “CERN for AI” initiative.

General Purpose AI Ambitions

The revised EuroHPC work programme indicates the Commission’s ambition for these data centres to nurture general purpose AI and undefined “new AI applications”. These are AI models trained on huge amounts of data, with huge computing power, to create general purpose models such as ChatGPT.

The AI ​​factory must “demonstrate sufficient computational resources to train general-purpose AI models at scale and emerging AI applications””, in accordance with the revised work programme of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

However, this amount is nothing compared to how much private companies spend on computing power to develop general-purpose AI.

The maximum computational investment of a single AI factory is limited to €400 million, which could buy about five thousand of NVIDIA’s latest, cutting-edge AI chips.

At the same time, Microsoft and xAI plan to launch AI-optimized computing clusters consisting of 100,000 such systems in 2025, information reported.

(Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic)

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