EU Announces €10 Billion Plan to Build Seven AI Supercomputing Factories
The European Commission has announced a €10 billion initiative to build seven AI supercomputing factories, aiming to attract an additional €20 billion in private investment. These factories will be equipped with at least 100,000 advanced AI chips each to significantly boost Europe's computing capacity. This initiative represents a major geopolitical push for European technological sovereignty, reducing dependence on US and Chinese AI infrastructure and cloud providers. It aims to bridge the massive gap in AI development and computing resources between Europe and its global competitors. The EU has signed letters of intent with AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm to secure hardware, though the project faces challenges like European electricity costs being double or triple those of the US and China. Once operational, these factories will more than double Europe's current computing capacity.
## BACKGROUND
The initiative is part of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) framework, which aims to build a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe. Currently, Europe heavily relies on foreign cloud providers, with its top five cloud services all being US-based, raising concerns over data privacy and operational autonomy.