Thanks to a change, the EuroHPC project can now work with artificial intelligence. The goal is to build “AI factories” across Europe.

The Council today approved an amendment to the rules of the European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Joint Undertaking. This amendment broadens the objectives to include the development and operation of ‘AI factories’, which are facilities that provide supercomputing service infrastructure for AI.

The amended regulations make the EU’s supercomputing capacity more accessible to innovative European start-ups and SMEs to train their AI models and develop their projects. This is the final step in the decision-making process.

Supercomputers for AI

With the rules adopted today, EuroHPC will promote and manage AI factories. These facilities should include an AI supercomputer, an associated data centre and AI-oriented supercomputing services.

The activities of AI factories will be open to both public and private users, with specific access conditions for start-ups and SMEs.

AI factories’ host facilities can receive EU financial support to cover up to 50 percent of the acquisition costs of AI supercomputers and up to 50 percent of the operational costs. AI supercomputers are mainly used to develop and test AI training models, applications and solutions.

Following today’s approval by the Council, the legal act has been adopted. The regulatory change will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union in the coming days and will enter into force 20 days later.

background

The EuroHPC joint venture was founded in 2018 to advance supercomputing in Europe. Since its inception, EuroHPC has purchased nine supercomputers located across Europe.

So far, the main objectives of EuroHPC have been to develop, implement, extend and maintain supercomputing systems, including quantum computers and data infrastructure ecosystems. The project aims to promote their use and support knowledge on the development of computing skills for European science and industry.

On 24 January 2024, the Commission proposed a regulation amending the current legal framework (Council Regulation (EU) 2021/1173) and introduced an additional objective for the Joint Undertaking: to support the development of an AI ecosystem in the EU by developing and managing AI factories. Member States reached a political agreement on the amendment on 23 May. This agreement was published today.