Europe's AI factories could be a launch pad – or a money pit

The European Union says it's setting up dedicated artificial intelligence hubs, in an attempt to catch up with the U.S. and China. Supercomputers are being built across the continent in order to train AI models for small companies – to be followed later by large public-access 'gigafactories'. 

While questions have been raised over the effectiveness of the plan, participating institutions within the member states welcomed the EU's step.

"The boost that you can expect is from our point of view huge," says Markus Stöhr, project manager at Vienna's Technical University where one of Europe's 13 AI factories will be operating next year. "There's a lot of demand when it comes to training or finetuning of AI models." 

Start-ups and small companies will be able to use AI-optimized supercomputers to train complex models. It's a small but much needed step to make Europe more competitive.

"You can add many many computers over a network to get a supercomputer," adds Valentin Hirschbrich, who is responsible for IT infrastructure. "We can use all the CPU and all the RAM of all the computers together for a single task."

The EU Commission says its AI factories are a core pillar of the block's strategy for Europe to become a leader in AI, bringing together 17 member states. It says the infrastructure and services provided by AI factories are essential for unlocking the full potential of the sector in Europe.

So far Brussels has invested roughly $2 billion, but there's more to come: four even bigger computing centers – the so-called gigafactories – are set to hopefully put Europe back on the international AI track. 

These massive high-performance computing facilities are also designed to develop and train next-generation AI models and applications, but on a larger scale.

The central question

After U.S. President Donald Trump announced $500 billion in private sector investment in AI infrastructure, the EU followed suit, pledging to raise around $200 billion to build AI gigafactories. 

However, the question remains whether such large data centers can be effective, given the current absence of cloud service businesses in Europe.

"We do have American cloud providers that run local installations in Europe, but obviously it would be nice if we would also have European companies," says Edgar Weippl, informatics professor at University of Vienna. 

"I think for the future, that we are competitive in Europe, the importance is attracting and keeping talented people in Europe."

The EU-funded AI factory in Vienna is set to focus on trustworthy artificial intelligence, for instance AI models that run on public data and do not violate the privacy of individuals.

"You could go to cloud providers but then you always have this issue with data privacy," says project manager Stöhr. "But we have an offer so we ensure that the data is located here in Vienna."

While most welcome the EU's latest supercomputer investments, some say financing hardware with public money is too risky as computer systems quickly become outdated – and that focusing on software development could be more cost-efficient.