European Commission Announces 2.1 Billion Euro Investment in Supercomputers for Start-Up Innovation and AI Development

The European Commission wants to invest 2.1 billion euros in supercomputers within the EuroHPC project. These supercomputers must be made available to start-ups, among other things. For example, the Commission wants to accelerate the development of generative AI in Europe.

Europe needs a healthy start-up and innovation ecosystem to reap the benefits of generative artificial intelligence and manage the risks, writes the European Commission. That is why the Commission has drawn up an action plan to strengthen that ecosystem. For example, the Commission talks about AI factories; European public supercomputers aimed at developing artificial intelligence. Those AI factories must also include experts in supercomputing and AI. Data specialists, researchers, start-ups and others should be able to use these AI factories.

The AI ​​supercomputers will be part of the EuroHPC JU supercomputer project, in which the EU is investing 8 billion euros from 2018 to 2027. Specialized AI supercomputers must be created within EuroHPC JU, for which the investment of 2.1 billion euros is made available. Use of these supercomputers is only permitted for organizations that will use them to create ‘ethical and responsible AI models and systems’. These supercomputers allow organizations to train AI models faster; a few weeks instead of six to nine months, according to the EC. This training would also be tens of millions of euros cheaper than using commercial cloud services, the Commission states.

In addition to the AI ​​factories, the Commission wants to invest additionally in Common European Data Spaces. These contain data on, for example, health, media, mobility, tourism and agriculture. The Commission wants to expand these Data Spaces so that more qualitative data becomes available for training AI models.

The Commission is also making one hundred million euros available to invest in start-ups and scale-ups. The EC hopes that by investing in these organizations, other governments and investors will also want to invest in these organizations. This should ultimately free up 1 billion euros in investments, the Commission says.

2024-01-24 19:55:58
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