EU sets out plans for ‘at least doubling’ its AI datacentre capacities over the next seven year

In order to meet the AI and computing needs of businesses and government administrations in the EU, and ensure competitiveness and sovereignty, it is important for the EU to increase their current cloud and datacentre capacities in a geographically-balanced manner.

The EU is consulting on legislation, dubbed the Cloud and AI Development Act, to accelerate the pace at which new datacentres are developed.

The average time it takes to get a permit for a datacentre and the environmental authorisations that go with it is often upwards of 48-months. [and] The datacentre industry struggles finding suitable sites and obtaining enough energy to power their facility. The Cloud and AI Development Act is designed to address these obstacles, according to the document.

This will be achieved by ensuring that datacentres that meet certain energy efficiency and water efficiency requirements can benefit from simplified permit procedures to allow them to be fast tracked.

For highly critical use cases such as AI applications, sovereignty, operational autonomy and security can only be maintained by relying upon highly secure EU-based clouds. The Cloud and AI Development Act ensures that the EU public sector can rely upon such capacity for these uses cases, laying the foundation for the public to adopt AI within a trust-based environment.

This document also stated that the EU aims to improve competition in the cloud market on the continent. The Cloud and AI Development Act, which will be introduced in 2019, will also explore the possibility of creating a common market for cloud services and capacity to allow a wider range of cloud service providers to enter the market.

All of these actions are part of an effort by the EU to create its own “distinctive AI approach by capitalising on what it does best and its strengths” so that it can establish itself as an “AI continental”. These strengths include access to “a substantial pool of engineers and professionals, a single market with a single set of safety regulations” that ensures the AI technologies produced and used by members are of high quality and reliable. The EU has a flourishing community with 6,300 AI startups. More than 600 of them are focused on generative AI. The document said that the continent’s AI compute infrastructure must be scaled up by creating “gigafactories”, which contain energy-efficient, high performance compute capacity, and can be connected via networks to create “AI factory”.

While the EU has committed to provide EUR20bn in AI infrastructure funding for the creation of five AI Gigafactories in the European Union, it is also asking interested parties to create public-private partnerships that will accelerate the construction of these facilities. The document stated that “These gigafactories are designed to foster scientific collaboration, bringing together investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers in order to tackle ambitious projects, such as healthcare, robotics, and scientific discovery.”

To establish the EU as a superpower in AI, it will be necessary for AI innovators to gain access to higher-quality data and to do more work on the continent to develop AI algorithms. This will encourage their adoption by “strategic” sectors.

The document stated that more needs to be done in order to grow the EU’s “strong AI talent base” by “further developing excellence” in AI education and researchers, as well as making it easier for workers in this field migrate legally across the continent.

John Buyers of Osborne Clarke’s global head of AI, said that the EU document has many similarities with the UK government’s recently released AI opportunities action plan.

[The] Key themes of the EU plans echo those of UK government’s

AI opportunities action plan – “such as the focus on boosting AI innovations, the importance for AI systems to be able to work on data and the need for an increase in compute capability,” he said.

There is a real focus on easing the burden and removing barriers to innovations… [and] The EU is explicitly recognising that AI is crucial for economic growth and safety.