“Europe must also become a global leader in AI innovation. AI Factories will help secure our position at the forefront of this transformative technology.” At the beginning of September, the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, added another layer to Europe’s ambitions through a for AI Factories. There are already around ten examples, led by the likes of Microsoft, Bouygues, Dell, Capgemini and Carrefour.
Seven proposals were submitted by 15 member states and two participating states, the on 11 November. These are: Finland (together with the participation of Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland), Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, Italy (with the participation of Austria and Slovenia), Spain (with the participation of Portugal, Romania and Turkey) and Greece. Cyprus and Slovenia have submitted letters of interest to join or create an AI Factory at a later stage. The next deadline for further proposals is 1 February 2025.
Carrefour optimises its 150 annual catalogues
The French food giant, which launched its own AI factory in 2020, is using it, for example, to optimise its promotions catalogue, or how to choose from among 32,000 products those that will ensure that, in the midst of 150 catalogues of presumed good deals per year, shoppers will go and buy something in one of the brand’s entities: 25% of the turnover (€5.3bn) of supermarkets and hypermarkets comes from promotions! This initiative has enabled Carrefour to put over 100 AI models into production in just five months.
With the support of Microsoft France, the “startup campus” Station F in Paris 2018 and developed an on-site artificial intelligence programme. , the AI Factory had helped support 17 startups, raised €12.2m and created nearly 100 new jobs. The startups were in sectors like agri-food, health, environment/energy, financial services and transport, as defined in Cédric Villani’s report “,” published in March 2018.
Dell targets shortage of experts
Dell, which in September, has a strategic interest in providing the market with experts who have all the skills required to run these technologies. And its partnership with Hugging Face, even more than with Microsoft, gives it an advantage that is well known to “artificial intelligence plumbers.”
Following a slightly different model, Alibaba in China, for example, has made more than 100 AI models freely available so that businesses can appropriate them (and then, of course, need the cloud and computing capacity that Alibaba can provide).
It is against this backdrop that the European Union is pushing for the launch of European AI factories, which “will bring together the key ingredients for success in AI: computing power, data and talent,” said the European Commission. “They will help AI developers train their large generative AI models by using the EuroHPC supercomputers and providing access to data, computing and storage services. The Factories will be networked across Europe, providing a unique European collaborative AI framework.”
Luxembourg well equipped
“The AI Factories will be connected to member states’ AI initiatives, creating a vibrant AI ecosystem. The Factories will also profit from and the ,” added the commission’s . “The AI Factories will propel the development and validation of AI industrial and scientific applications in key European sectors such as healthcare, energy, automotive and transport, defence and aerospace, robotics and manufacturing, clean and agri tech.”
It’s a digital version of the diversification strategy launched in Luxembourg nearly 15 years ago with the development of clusters, except that here we're talking about e-clusters. The news comes after the .
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