EU makes €20B push into computing power for AI

The European Union is planning a €20 billion fund to help keep up in the global artificial intelligence race, the bloc’s biggest response so far to massive U.S. investment plans.

European Commission Ursula von der Leyen told France’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit that she wanted to set up more AI gigafactories in the EU to provide the computing power to train the largest and most complex AI models.

“Global AI leadership is still up for grabs,” she said in a speech. “Too often I hear that Europe is late to the race, while the United States or China already got ahead.”

“Our goal is that every company, not only the big players, have access to the computing power they need,” she said, calling the EU’s effort “the largest public investment for AI in the world, which will unlock over ten times more private investment.”

The €20 billion InvestAI fund– partly financed from existing EU funding programs – aims to leverage up to €200 billion which could come from EU governments and private sources, potentially with the involvement of the EU government-owned European Investment Bank.

This is the EU’s answer to the U.S. administration’s announcement of a $500 billion hardware plan to build data centers that could fuel the country’s ambitions to lead the world on AI. French President Emmanuel Macron this week also announced a €109 billion plan to boost AI in France in the coming years.

The emergence of a low-cost Chinese AI model, DeepSeek, has since rocked the industry by showing that AI systems can be built without massive investment.

Von der Leyen’s announcement builds on a December pledge of €2 billion for seven AI-optimized supercomputers, which will be open to startups to train AI models. Five more will be announced “soon,” the Commission said today.

The €20 billion InvestAI funding will draw from programs like the Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe and InvestEU.

Commission tech sovereignty chief Henna Virkkunen said the EU wanted to help a strong AI start-up community that can “often lack access to computing capacity.”

“In one year, we will have five times more computing capacity in supercomputers than we have today, but of course, more investments are needed,” she told POLITICO in an interview.