The European Union has announced the InvestAI initiative, which mobilizes €200 billion in investment to develop artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, News.bg reports. The project also includes a new €20 billion fund aimed at creating AI gigafactories.
According to the European Commission, building such a large-scale AI infrastructure is vital to ensuring the open and collaborative development of the most complex AI models. This step is part of the drive to make Europe a leader in artificial intelligence.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, stressed that AI will play a key role in improving healthcare, boosting research and innovation, and increasing the EU's competitiveness.
The President of the European Investment Bank, Nadia Calvino, noted that together with the European Commission, the EIB is stepping up support for artificial intelligence, which is a key driver of innovation and productivity in Europe.
The InvestAI fund will finance the construction of four AI gigafactories in different parts of the European Union. The new gigafactories will specialize in training complex AI models that require extremely high computing power. Each of them will have around 100,000 latest-generation AI chips – four times more than those currently being built.
These gigafactories will be the largest public-private partnership to develop reliable AI on a global scale. They will follow the European model of collaboration, with a focus on open innovation and applications in industrial and mission-critical areas. The aim is to ensure that every company has access to large-scale computing resources to build the future.
InvestAI will be a multi-layered fund, comprising stocks with different risk and return profiles. These investments will be supported by existing EU digitalisation funding programmes, such as "Digital Europe", "Horizon Europe" and InvestEU. EU Member States can also contribute by programming funds from their cohesion envelopes. The combination of grants and equity to finance the Gigafactories will be a pilot for strategic technologies under the "Competitiveness" initiative.
In December 2024, the Commission announced the first seven AI factories, with five more to follow soon. The existing €10 billion support for AI factories, co-financed by the EU and Member States, already represents the largest public investment in AI globally, and is expected to leverage ten times more private investment.
In addition to the InvestAI fund, the Commission is taking a number of additional actions to support AI innovation in Europe. Part of this effort is the creation of a European AI Research Council, which will pool resources and focus on harnessing the untapped potential of data to support AI and other innovative technologies. This year, the Commission will also launch the "AI Deployment" initiative. to promote industrial adoption of AI in key sectors.