Europe launches €10bn push to build seven AI gigafactories | News. az
Credit: telegraphindia. comThe European Union is offering €10 billion in funding to support companies building seven AI gigafactories as it seeks to narrow the technology gap with the United States and. . .
Credit: telegraphindia. comThe European Union is offering €10 billion in funding to support companies building seven AI gigafactories as it seeks to narrow the technology gap with the United States and China. The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive, said it would like the public financing to draw an additional €20 billion in private investment,The Irish Newsreported. RECOMMENDED STORIESEU sends nearly $4 billion to Ukraine for drones, missiles and air defensesEU unveils €30B plan to build seven large AI data centersUkraine secures EU-funded long-range missile deliveriesThousands evacuated as wildfire rages across Greece's Crete Island“Access to the raw scale of computing power within AI gigafactories is a strategic necessity for Europe as AI development accelerates,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission executive vice president overseeing tech sovereignty. Efforts by Brussels to establish “tech sovereignty” have gained urgency as leaders worry about dependence on technologies from foreign providers, which they say could be “weaponised” against Europeans. US President Donald Trump has railed against the EU over its tech regulations and China has limited the supply of minerals critical to the sector. Firms can now bid for contracts to build gigafactories that are planned to have at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips, making them roughly four times more powerful than the data centres currently running in the EU. The EU’s current computing power – delivered by a network of 19 AI data centres from Finland to Spain – will more than double when these seven gigafactories come online. Europe lags far behind the US and China in crucial sectors for the development of AI, according to a 2025 assessment by the US Federal Reserve. Chinahas an enormous electrical power capacity for data centres, while the US bags the lion’s share of private AI investment. Europe does not manufacture many of the millions of components needed for data centres and electricity in the EU can cost double or triple what it does in the US and China, according to a Commission report presented to European Parliament in June. “European businesses and public authorities will continue to rely on US AI providers to the detriment of European service providers struggling to work at the frontier,” said the report, which listed the bloc’s top five cloud service providers as all American. “Dependence on hyperscale cloud and AI computing service providers, particularly for highly critical use cases, will continue to expose data to third-country access and carry risks to service continuity, endangering operational autonomy. ”France’s Mistral runs the one of the largest AI data centres in the EU so far at its campus in Paris. Mistral makes the Le Chat chatbot but it has not kept pace with American AI companies like OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and Chinese rivals like DeepSeek. While political leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron have raised the alarm about Europe lacking home-grown AI companies, deep anxieties run rife across the continent about the economic disruption and privacy implications of the nascent technology. The Commission said AI products developed with the growing network of data centres will “follow EU standards on data protection, safety, security and ethics”, perhaps referring to the bloc’s Digital Services Act and its Digital Market Act. In June, 40 mayors around the world signed a pact to curtail the negative impact of the construction of AI data centres on the natural resources, energy prices or climate targets of cities from Phoenix to Melbourne. News. AzBy Ulviyya Salmanli