At the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the launch of InvestAI, a new initiative aimed at mobilising €200 billion in AI investments. A key component of the initiative is a €20 billion European AI fund dedicated to building AI gigafactories—large-scale computing infrastructure designed to power the next generation of AI development.
The initiative will be a public-private partnership, likened to a “CERN for AI,” allowing all scientists and businesses—not just the largest tech players—to access the necessary computing power to develop advanced AI models.
The EU’s InvestAI fund will finance four AI gigafactories across Europe, each designed to train highly complex AI models that require massive computing resources. These gigafactories will feature approximately 100,000 state-of-the-art AI chips, quadrupling the capacity of existing AI factories. The focus will be on industrial and scientific applications, including breakthroughs in medicine, climate research, and advanced robotics.
Alongside InvestAI, the European Commission continues to support AI innovation through a range of initiatives, including:
- Financial support for generative AI via Horizon Europe and Digital Europe.
- Skilling and reskilling programmes to strengthen Europe’s AI talent pool.
- Investment in AI start-ups and scale-ups through venture capital and equity support.
- Development of Common European Data Spaces to provide AI developers with high-quality training data.
- The ‘GenAI4EU’ initiative, aimed at fostering AI applications in healthcare, biotech, manufacturing, climate, and mobility.
- The European AI Research Council, set to coordinate AI research across Europe.
Later this year, the ‘Apply AI’ initiative will be launched to accelerate industrial AI adoption in key economic sectors.
