Context: Ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris on Sunday, France’s President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a plan to invest €109 billion in private investment in the country’s AI sector over the “coming years”. The plan was made in response to the €500 billion “Stargate Project” that U.S. President Donald Trump presented last month (January 23, 2025 ai fray article). Macron said the plan was just as ambitious as the U.S. one when considering investment per capita: “It is the French equivalent of what the U.S. announced with Stargate. It is the same proportion.” The investment will mostly go towards building new data centres and will include a contribution of over €30 billion from the United Arab Emirates and a further €20 billion from Canadian investment firm Brookfield.
What’s new: Today, during a speech at the AI Action Summit (February 11, 2025 speech), European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a brand new “EU InvestAI” initiative, which aims to mobilise €200 billion in AI investment, including a new European fund of €20 billion for four AI gigafactories. The EU is already over halfway through building 12 AI hubs with smaller AI factories.
Direct impact and wider ramifications: It is too soon to say what the actual direct impact will be on the EU’s AI industry, but it is certainly a significant investment that will benefit many in the ecosystem, including helping hospitals train models based on images and genomic data they own. This announcement also means the EU has pledged to invest the second-largest amount in the AI industry in the world (although it is the top in terms of public investment (€10 billion)), following the U.S. ($500 billion) but way ahead of China ($8.2 billion). But, as Mrs. von der Leyen pointed out today, the EC will need more capital from the private sector if it wants to successfully launch its more ambitious AI gigafactories.
Mrs. von der Leyen started her speech today by reflecting on the strengths of Europe’s AI ecosystem, including that the number of AI companies that became unicorns has increased by 10 times in the last few years, the number of AI professionals per capita is higher than in any other region of the world, and it is home to a wealth of data.
But, she noted, the EC wants AI to be trained with that high-quality data. So, it has created talented and computing hubs that it has dubbed “AI factories”. So far, the EC has already gotten seven up and running, with the remaining five on their way.
Mrs. von der Leyen warned that start-ups need resources to scale up and that the EU is far from widespread adoption of AI. “That is why we are moving to the next level – we want to expand our model of open cooperation to be able to host frontier innovation in AI,” she said.
The next step in the process for the EU is the launch of its AI gigafactories – very large data and computing infrastructures to train very large models. The EU plans to launch four of them, which will require a collective 100,000 last-generation AI chips (four times what is required by the AI factories being set up now).
The EC President emphasized that the gigafactories, unlike those announced in the U.S., “won’t be a monopoly of a few… but accessible to all” and dubbed it the “CERN of AI”. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and has enabled “countless breakthrough innovations, including the World Wide Web”, she reminded the audience.
The key difference between the two, of course, is the funding. The private sector will need to be fully involved in the gigafactories, and there will need to be more capital for that to happen, she pointed out. The current InvestAI fund is layered, with an initial bit coming from existing EU funding programmes which have a digital component, such as the Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe, and InvestEU. The funding for the AI factories that are currently in progress totals €10 billion and is co-financed by the EU and Member States, making it the largest public investment in AI in the world.
She added:
“The development of AI for public good demands not just competition but also collaboration – and Europe has a long and successful tradition of pooling knowledge, sharing research… this is the European way.”
President of the European Investment Bank Nadia Calviño said in a statement today:
“Together with the EU Commission, the EIB Group is stepping up support for Artificial Intelligence, a key driver of innovation and productivity in Europe.”
Meanwhile, EC Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen said today:
“By putting together our resources, we will enable AI entrepreneurs to innovate and scale up in the most demanding fields of AI. We will be ready to lead the way on AI with the state-of-the-art infrastructure.”