The European Commission expects that public funds will help attract an additional €20 billion in private investment, according to the AP. Companies will now be able to participate in tenders for the construction of new facilities.
“Access to the enormous computing power of AI gigafactories is a strategic necessity for Europe as the development of artificial intelligence accelerates,” said Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President of the European Commission.
Each of the new centers will be equipped with at least 100,000 state-of-the-art AI chips. According to the European Commission’s estimates, they will be roughly four times more powerful than the largest data centers currently operating in EU countries.
Today, Europe has 19 specialized data centers for artificial intelligence—from Finland to Spain. Once the seven new facilities are launched, the EU’s total computing power is expected to more than double.
Brussels cites the need to reduce dependence on foreign technologies as the rationale for the project. Currently, many European companies and government agencies rely on cloud services and AI solutions developed by U.S. companies.
The European Commission believes that such dependence could pose risks to data protection and the operation of critical government and commercial systems.
It should be noted that Europe still lags significantly behind the U.S. and China in the development of artificial intelligence. The U.S. receives the lion’s share of global private investment in this sector, while China has greater capacity to build energy-intensive data centers.
Another challenge for Europe is the high cost of electricity. According to the European Commission, electricity costs for data centers in the EU can be two to three times higher than in the U.S. and China.
Furthermore, Europe does not produce nearly all the components needed to build modern artificial intelligence centers.
According to the AP, one of the best-known European companies operating in this field is the French firm Mistral AI. The company is developing its own artificial intelligence models and the chatbot Le Chat, but so far it lags behind U.S. companies, including OpenAI, and Chinese competitors in terms of scale.
The European Commission states that the new AI centers will operate in accordance with European rules on data protection, security, and ethics. At the same time, city authorities around the world are warning of the potential consequences of the rapid growth in the number of data centers. In June, 40 mayors signed an agreement calling for consideration of the impact of such facilities on energy consumption, electricity prices, and the climate.
