European Commission is moving ahead with ‘AI Factories’

The European Commission has started moving ahead with efforts to facilitate data centres for artificial intelligence (AI), needed to boost the EU’s competitiveness globally.  

AI Factories will provide compute, data, and talent to develop and test AI models for startups, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and scientists, according to the Commission. 

“If the EU wants to be competitive with China or the US, we need to be quick [with establishing AI Factories]” a spokesperson from the Commission told Euractiv in June. 

Last Friday (26 July) the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), a joint EU and European countries initiative to develop and manage supercomputers, amended its Work Programme to pave the way for AI Factories.

EuroHPC JU also said that it will launch a call for the expression of interest for countries wanting to host an AI Factory on September 9, two months behind the original schedule.

The first call for AI Factories hosting entities was “envisaged” for July 2024, with the factories deployed by mid-2025, the Commission spokesperson said. 

The Commission and EuroHPC JU have not jointly committed to a specific timeline for the first AI Factories to become operational.  

European researchers already access large supercomputers through the EuroHPC access calls, which already contain a call for “AI and data-intensive projects”. With the AI Factories, the Commission wants to expand access and build new AI-specialised data centres for the EuroHPC stack.

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

Member states can apply to establish an AI Factory for which the EU will provide 50% of the funding and the participating states the rest.  

Once operational, the EuroHPC JU will allocate half of the compute resources, possibly through an updated access policy, while the participating states will manage the other half as they please. Companies or research groups who want to use an AI Factory can apply through EuroHPC JU or through a participating member state. 

Repurposed Digital Europe Programme and Horizon Europe funds 

The current maximum budget for the AI factories is €1.96 billion, less than the original estimate of €2.1 billion. 

Each budget line is dependent on availability and the Commission will only spend money matched one to one by the participating states. 

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

Up to €180 million will be funded by Horizon Europe (HE) for establishing and operating the AI Factories, including an option to develop an experimental AI-optimised computing platform.  

Up to €400 million of the DEP funds will be committed starting in 2025, with the rest committed until 2027. 

The AI Factories are part of an AI innovation package announced in January, in line with the Commission’s wider push to increase total EU spending on AI to €20 billion annually by 2030, including private investments.  

The EU executive proposed the investment plan in 2021, following which it is already spending more than €1 billion annually from the DEP and HE budgets. 

It is unclear how the AI Factories will interplay with other initiatives aimed at helping businesses deploy AI, like the European Digital Innovation Hubs, Testing and Experimentation Facilities, the regulatory sandboxes required by the AI Act or the recently touted “CERN for AI” initiative. 

General purpose AI ambitions 

The EuroHPC’s amended working programme points to the Commission’s ambition for general purpose-AI and undefined “emerging AI applications” to be nurtured in these data centers. These are AI models trained on vast amounts of data, on vast computational power, to produce general-purpose models like ChatGPT.  

An AI factory has to “demonstrate enough computing resources for training large scale, general-purpose AI models and emerging AI applications”, according to the amended EuroHPC JU Work Programme.

However, the funding pales in comparison to what private companies are spending on compute to develop general purpose AI. 

The maximum compute investment of a single AI factory is capped at €400 million, which could buy around five thousand of NVIDIA’s latest cutting-edge AI chips.  

At the same time, Microsoft and xAI are each planning to operationalise AI-optimised compute clusters in 2025 with 100,000 of those chips, The Information reported.

[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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