I just read someone complaining about the marketing term “AI gigafactory”, implying something of worth would be manufactured.
I share his critique.
Giga’s can be worth something
Instead of this hype, maybe the EU should focus on some basic tech first? Such as industry to manufacture basic household devices.
But what about the wildfires
This is a significant step for Europe’s AI ambitions. Access to large scale compute has become one of the biggest barriers to building competitive AI models. If executed well, these gigafactories could give European startups, researchers, and companies the infrastructure they need to innovate at home instead of relying almost entirely on US or Chinese providers.
, these gigafactories could give European startups, researchers, and companies the infrastructure they need to innovate at home instead of relying almost entirely on US or Chinese providers.
Bullshit. Several European countries much have more data center capacities each than China (or anyone else but the US and their insane bubble burning trillions without any reasonable business model). Combined the EU is in a very good position.
(For reference: Germany has more than 500 data centers, France slightly less, the UK even a few more. The EU has more than 1500. Compared to ~300 in China… (also even less in India or Australia) with no one else even coming close. It’s really just the US that sticks out and a lot of their data centers are hallucinations where the usual suspects opened up massive installations and declared them operational, while most of it isn’t even build or just empty buildings.)
PS: And just because… https://isaiprofitable.com/
It’s easy to underestimate how different these facilities are: Traditional data centres are built to run millions of separate workloads efficiently. AI data centres are engineered to make tens of thousands of GPUs act like one giant supercomputer. The building may look similar, but the power, cooling, networking and economics are almost an entirely different industry.
The market is fragmented across the Member States, each of which conducts its own research. That is precisely what needs to change. Hopefully, this approach will work.
Can AWS or Microsoft or the like join consortia that apply?