Against the backdrop of increasing concerns about digital dependency, the European Commission is aiming to create a “sovereign” artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, which is expected to become operational by mid-2028.
The community executive has launched a call for bids for the public funding of up to seven AI “gigafactories” in Europe, as Brussels hurries to build a sovereign infrastructure for training advanced AI models and to catch up with global competitors in the technology field, reports Thursday Euronews.
AI gigafactories are large-scale computing centers, equipped with state-of-the-art, highly specialized chips, designed to train next-generation AI technologies – especially the most advanced large-scale linguistic models (LLMs), which require the processing of trillions of data points.
This measure is part of a broader effort to ensure technological sovereignty, intended to reduce the EU’s dependence on foreign providers of cloud services and chips.
The global race to build increasingly powerful models, promising revolutionary progress both economically and militarily, has triggered a parallel competition for the construction of the infrastructure that underpins them. Large-scale data center projects are already well underway in the USA and China.
In response, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced a plan to build “gigafactories” for artificial intelligence in Europe, on the occasion of the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February 2025, with the ambition to replicate the success of the CERN laboratory in Geneva.
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