European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the EU will top up a continental AI push to hit €200 billion ($207 billion).
The funding comes as Europe looks over its shoulder nervously at the US’s $500 billion Stargate Project and new Chinese AI contender DeepSeek.
The €150 billion ($155 billion) in the European AI Champions initiative pot so far was placed there by backers led by venture capitalist General Catalyst, and includes Dutch photolithography giant ASML, France’s Airbus, Germany’s Siemens, Infineon, Philips, Volkswagen and more. The EU budget will, among other things, serve to “derisk” the investment of the private firms. The new funding was announced at the AI Action Summit in Paris, France.
The EU’s €200 billion is smaller than the amount of funding announced for America’s Stargate project, which aims to build advanced AI infrastructure with an eventual $500 billion price tag. OpenAI’s Stargate was billed by US pres Donald Trump as “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history,” though following this his right hand man and would-be OpenAI owner Elon Musk claimed “They don’t actually have the money.” The project is backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX.
Von der Leyen said the EU’s InvestAI fund would finance four future AI gigafactories across the region, specialized in training “the most complex, very large, AI models.” She said the bloc wants AI “to be a force for good and for growth. We are doing this through our own European approach – based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent.” The Commission had already announced an initial seven AI factories in December and said it would “soon announce the next five.”
The Commish said the bloc’s “approach still needs to be supercharged,” claiming the move would “mobilize unprecedented capital…” in a “unique” public-private partnership she characterized as a “CERN for AI.”
Von der Leyen, a second term commission president and famously a backer of Europe’s data privacy game changer the General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR), as well as Big Tech antitrust law the Digital Services Act, was also keen to let the world know the EU would be reducing bureaucratic red tape. Like it or not, AI technology is perceived as business-critical, and this is not lost on the politicos.
The Commission yesterday decided to withdraw its long-stalled ePrivacy Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Liability Directive (AILD), long feared by the tech sector as it would have made it much easier for people to sue companies over damages caused by AI tech.
The Register understands an impact assessment of the directive is partly behind the decision.
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