A year after the announcement by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission has now launched the official tender for the AI “gigafactories”. The aim of the super data centers is to promote the “AI continent”. According to senior EU officials, the aim of the initiative is to gain independent computing capacity from the EU and friendly countries. The public-private partnership consists of co-financing and basically follows the concept of “AI factories” that the EU has launched in recent years. However, it is likely that these will no longer be sufficient for so-called frontier models, according to senior Commission officials.
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The main users from the public sector are universities, research institutions and authorities. Henna Virkkunen describes today’s tender as a “milestone”. She is Executive Vice President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy in the EU Commission. “Access to massive computing power within AI gigafactories is a strategic imperative for Europe as AI development accelerates.”
A special feature is the financing of the project: up to 10 billion euros are to come from the public sector, another 20 billion from the private sector. Investors from the EU and “like-minded countries” should play an important role here. States that participate in the project should be able to distribute part of the computing capacity to their users on their own initiative.
Germany only made it into the second round
In the first contract, four consortia are to build data centers that have the computing power of 75,000 Nvidia H100 accelerators. Three more will follow later in a second batch. The benchmark with the H100 GPUs is surprising, after all they are already four years old. Since then, two new generations have appeared, most recently Ruby.
At the start, EU funds of 100 million euros are available per project; later, 400 million euros will be available for each project. The new data centers should be ready within 18 months of the contract being awarded. Distribution across multiple locations is only possible under certain circumstances: “We don’t want a hundred small data centers,” says a high-ranking person in charge at EuroHPC.
In the first round, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Finland, France and Poland agreed to participate, and another eight member states want to take part. Only in the second round do other important countries such as Italy, Spain and Germany want to follow suit. It’s about even more money.
EU-Gigafactories auf EU-Boden
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It remains to be seen whether German companies will also have a chance. However, the probability of this is high. Although non-EU companies are also allowed to participate in the projects, control over the respective consortia must be located in the EU. The data centers must also be physically located on Union territory and therefore under the control of EU states.
Otherwise, EU standards should apply. The award conditions are intended to exclude non-EU states from having influence on the AI gigafactories. However, people involved say that they rely on hardware from Nvidia, Qualcomm or AMD. The upcoming “Cloud and AI Development Act” (CADA) is intended to define the exact usage criteria, including requirements for sovereignty.
The EU also provides rules for sustainability and electricity from renewable energies. The focus is on high energy efficiency and thus competitiveness.
In fact, at least some parts of the project are subject to twofold reservations: On the one hand, the member states and private investors must first be found. On the other hand, part of the project is also subject to funding from the EU. Member states, the European Parliament and the EU Commission are currently still arguing about the next EU budget – among others, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) recently called for massive changes to the EU financial planning.
(dahe)
