The European Commission wants Europe to lead the world on AI – and it knows it will not come cheap. At the Paris AI Action Summit, President Ursula von der Leyen announced InvestAI, an initiative seeking to mobilise €200 billion to fuel AI. A fund of €20 billion will fund European ‘GigaAI’ factories – massive computing hubs available to AI researchers and entrepreneurs. This “unique public-private partnership, akin to a CERN for AI, will enable all our scientists and companies – not just the biggest – to develop the most advanced very large models needed to make Europe an AI continent,” von der Leyen said.
InvestAI will include €50 billion in public funds, drawn from existing EU programmes such as the Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe, and InvestEU. The European Commission also plans to raise over €150 billion in private funds from European firms. The initiative will establish four new AI European gigafactories with sufficient computing infrastructure to train advanced AI models, consisting of approximately 100,000 last-generation AI chips. This is four times more than the Commission’s previously announced AI Factories initiative.
Von der Leyen’s announcements stem from a growing recognition that Europe needs to increase AI investments to stay in the AI race as the US and China forge ahead. Observers have noted that Trump’s ‘Project Stargate’ – the planned $500 billion investment to build AI supercomputers led by Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI – is almost 250 times larger than the AI Factories initiative. In response, European academics and think tanks have been calling for a ‘CERN for AI’ – pooling resources to replicate the success of the European Organization for Nuclear Research – a proposal recognised in the Commission’s Competitiveness Compass. Now, their calls for scale have been answered.
The launch of the Chinese startup Deepseek’s low-cost R1 model in January led many to question the massive AI spending of Western companies and governments. However, Big Tech firms reject the idea that investing in more computing power no longer produces better models. They are spending more than ever on AI: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta forecast spending $320 billion in 2025, up from $246 billion in 2024 and $151 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, China recently announced its AI Industry Development Action Plan, which is set to invest 1 trillion yuan ($137 billion) to support its AI industry over the next five years. At least in the short term, betting big appears essential to stay in the AI race.
