The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking has recently announced the establishment of seven state-of-the-art AI Factories across the continent. This development not only positions Europe as a global leader in artificial intelligence but also indicates a new era of AI innovation in Europe—an era in which Member States and industry leaders will collaborate to foster a dynamic ecosystem for niche AI solutions.
Building Europe’s AI backbone
This is, all in all, an important investment in the digital future of Europe, joined by the national and EU funding through the Digital Europe Programme and Horizon Europe, amounting in total to €1.5 billion. These AI factories will be centers of excellence where substantial computing infrastructure is combined with rich datasets and bespoke human skills for developing sophisticated models of artificial intelligence.
Hosting sites will include a selection of the most advanced research institutions across Europe, from Barcelona to Athens, with a total of 15 Member States proposed and two countries participating in EuroHPC. This will comprise five new AI-optimised supercomputers, located in Finland, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Sweden, while upgrading the existing ones in Spain and Greece, including experimental platforms to develop and test AI models. Installation will be part of the overall planned doubling of computing performance to take place by 2026.
Strategic boost for key sectors
The AI Factories will be all about delivering practical solutions to challenges related to strategic areas such as health, manufacturing, climate, and cybersecurity among others. For example, they will contribute to the development of specialised vertical AI models applied in different industrial contexts; they will further improve European large language models, fostering innovative applications across various sectors.
In order to realise the vision of pursuing the construction of an ecosystem, these factories will be made for networking academia, supercomputing centres, start-ups, and SMEs, connecting talent to money in ways to provide pathways to an AI economy. For this reason, this initiative addresses the needs that the European Union faces in the search for digital sovereignty and global competitiveness.
Connecting the dots: AI factories and CEI-Sphere
While the AI Factories will provide for supercomputing and higher-order AI models, the CEI-Sphere project, part of the EUCloudEdgeIoT.eu initiative, is strategically placed at the juncture of Cloud-Edge-IoT technologies, accelerating innovation in decentralised computing. AI Factories and CEI-Sphere represent the complementary cornerstones within the setting of AI-enabled Europe. Aiming both at achieving a fully digital ecosystem development, AI Factories will create the hosting infrastructure necessary for developing disruptive AI research, whereas CEI-Sphere will provide interoperable, scalable and privacy-preserving cloud, edge and IoT solutions.
CEI-Sphere’s Large-Scale Pilots (LSPs) will execute practical cloud-edge solutions starting from January 2025, which can be applied to many vertical industries: energy, manufacturing, among others. Many of these pilots will gain immense benefits from the computational resources and AI models under development within the scope of AI factories, enabling computing from cloud to edge and high-performance AI infrastructure.
For example, consider a CEI-Sphere pilot in Finland on smart agriculture using some of the AI Factory. Sophisticated models hosted within the factory would optimally schedule irrigations using real-time IoT data emanating from edge devices deployed at farms.
This initiative highlights Europe’s commitment to driving innovation at scale, setting the pathway for the core outcomes of its digital transformation to be driven in the future.
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