The European Commission has launched an initiative to push €200 billion (£166.6bn) into AI investment across the continent, including a new European fund of €20 billion (£16.6bn) for the construction of AI gigafactories.

Announced today (11th Feb) by President Ursula von der Leyen at the AI Action Summit in Paris, the Commission said that the InvestAI fund will go towards large-scale AI infrastructure projects, vital for the development of complex models that will see Europe become an ‘AI continent’.

The EU chief told her audience at the AI summit that both public and private investment would be funnelled towards the project, with the EU set to contribute €50 billion (£41.6bn), with the rest reportedly being pledged by a collection of ‘providers, investors and industry’.

The initiative will include a layered fund, with the EU budget in place to de-risk the investment of other partners. Initial funding for InvestAI will come from existing EU funding programmes, such as Horizon Europe, while funding of the AI gigafactories will be through a mix of grants and equity.

“We are doing this through our own European approach – based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent. But our approach still needs to be supercharged,” said von der Leyen.

“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.”

According to the Commission, the new gigafactories will be specialised in training the next generation of AI models, ones which will require extensive computing infrastructure for breakthroughs in specific domains such as medicine or science.

The gigafactories will have around 100 000 last-generation AI chips, around four times more than the AI factories being set up right now.

The European Commission already announced the construction of an initial seven AI factories in December, and is soon set to announce another five, with existing support of €10 billion (£8.3bn), co-financed by the EU and the member states.

With the InvestAI fund, the Commission claims that these new factories will be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI, modelled on cooperative, open innovation, with a focus on complex industrial and mission-critical applications.

So far, the EU has not had as much success in the development or deployment of homegrown AI models as the US and China, with some high profile startups taking issue with the bloc’s commitment to emerging tech.

Last year, for instance, Mistral AI, the French startup founded in 2023 by former researchers at Meta and DeepMind, warned that European datacentres were reaching capacity, and could not keep up to match the growing demand in training AI models.

That has since spurred some investment, with Mistral announcing just yesterday that it is investing several billion into the construction of its own data centre in France, and also joining with dozens of other European companies to form the ‘EU Champions Initiative’.

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However, European policymakers will have to move even faster if homegrown tech firms are to keep up with their overseas rivals. Giving his own speech at the AI summit, the new US Vice President, JD Vance, made it clear that America is gunning to be at the heart of the AI revolution, prioritising innovation and de-regulation.

“The United States of America is the leader in AI and our administration plans to keep it that way,” said Vance.

“The Trump administration believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression and beyond.

“This administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we are the partner of choice for other foreign countries and certainly businesses as they expand their own use of AI.”