{"id":158961,"date":"2025-04-10T09:38:32","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T07:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cde.ual.es\/?p=158961"},"modified":"2025-04-10T09:41:22","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T07:41:22","slug":"ai-continent-the-commissions-ambitious-action-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cde.ual.es\/en\/ai-continent-the-commissions-ambitious-action-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cAI Continent\u201d, the Commission’s ambitious Action Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI Factories are open and dynamic AI ecosystems built around the public network of world-leading EuroHPC supercomputers in Europe. They support the EU’s AI research and industrial ecosystem by bringing together the necessary ingredients – computing power, data and talent – to create cutting-edge and reliable AI models and applications. They foster collaboration across Europe, unlocking the potential of AI companies, in particular SMEs and start-ups, universities and industry. AI Factories serve to drive advances in AI applications in various sectors, such as health, manufacturing, climate change, finance, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

The goal of the AI Continent Action Plan <\/strong>, which was launched on 9 April, is to become a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI). As outlined by President Von der Leyen<\/strong> at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, the aim of this ambitious initiative is to transform Europe’s large traditional industries and their exceptional talent assets into powerful drivers of AI innovation and acceleration.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The AI Continent Action Plan will boost the EU’s AI innovation capabilities through actions and policies built around five key pillars:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Building a large-scale AI data and computing infrastructure\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

The Commission will strengthen Europe’s artificial intelligence and supercomputing infrastructure with a network of AI Factories<\/strong>. Thirteen of these AI Factories are already being set up around Europe’s cutting-edge supercomputers. They will support AI start-ups, AI industry and EU researchers in developing AI models and applications.<\/span><\/p>\n

As announced in the Competitiveness Compass, the EU will also contribute to the creation of AI gigafactories<\/strong>. These will be large-scale facilities equipped with approximately 100,000 state-of-the-art AI chips, four times more than current AI factories. They will incorporate massive computing capacity and data centres to train and develop complex AI models on an unprecedented scale. AI gigafactories will lead the next wave of frontier AI models and maintain the EU’s strategic autonomy in critical industrial and scientific sectors, requiring public and private investments. A call for expressions of interest for interested consortia is published today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Private investment in gigafactories will be further incentivised through the <\/span>InvestAI <\/strong>initiative <\/span>, which will mobilise \u20ac20 billion of investment for a total of up to five AI gigafactories across the EU.<\/span><\/p>\n

To stimulate private sector investment in cloud capacity and data centres, the Commission will also propose a Cloud Computing and AI Development Act<\/strong>. It aims to at least triple the capacity of EU data centres in the next five to seven years<\/strong>, giving priority to highly sustainable data centres.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Increasing access to large volumes of high quality data<\/span><\/h4>\n

Boosting AI innovation also requires access to large volumes of high quality data. An important element of the Action Plan is the creation of data labs<\/strong> where large volumes of high quality data from different sources are collected and preserved in AI factories. An EU data strategy<\/strong> will be launched in 2025, a comprehensive initiative to create a true internal market for data to enable AI solutions to be scaled up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Building on the increased data availability of the Data Act and the Data Governance Act, the Commission will focus its attention on harnessing the potential of data for innovation and the development of generative AI, inter alia, to boost our competitiveness and become an “AI Continent”. To achieve this, the Commission will present a European Data Union Strategy in the second half of 2025, focused on making more data available for AI and ensuring a simplified, clear and coherent legal framework for businesses and administrations to share data seamlessly and at scale, while respecting high privacy and security standards.<\/span><\/p>\n

The European Data Union Strategy will focus on strengthening Europe’s data ecosystem:<\/span><\/p>\n