By 2030, the EU should increase its computing power by 300 percent, and 100 million Europeans should have acquired AI skills, OpenAI said on Monday in recommendations called the “EU’s economic blueprint” targeted at EU policymakers. It also pitched a €1 billion fund for AI pilot projects.
Show us the obstacles
The EU’s executive in its plan on Wednesday wants to ask the tech industry to “identify where regulatory uncertainty creates obstacles” to developing and deploying AI.
The draft text listed measures to boost the computing power and high-quality data needed to train AI models, as well as the industry’s uptake of AI and workers’ AI skills.
Brussels is also set to make progress on its effort to build five “AI gigafactories” — a €20 billion promise made by Commission President Von der Leyen during the Paris AI Action Summit. Wednesday’s plan includes a call for EU countries to invest in or host such gigafactories — a first step for gauging interest before a more formal procedure kicks off at the end of this year.
Those gigafactories are meant to train the most complex AI models and will have four times the processors of the current most performant supercomputers.
The Commission is also paving the way to expand Europe’s cloud and data center capacity. The draft stated that Brussels aims to “triple” Europe’s data center capacity in the next five to seven years.
It labeled Europe’s current reliance on “non-EU infrastructure,” notably American hyperscalers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as a concern for industry and governments.
