Commission launches new InvestAI initiative to mobilise €200 billion of investment in AI

Image of an artificial brain on a black background, with white text. Text reads: Commission launches new InvestAI initiative to mobilise €200 billion of investment in AI

This year's AI Action Summit took place from 6 - 11 February in the Grand Palais in Paris. Heads of State and government, leaders of international organisations, members of academia, research and social partners, and key industry leaders gathered in the French capital. Over 100 concrete actions, aiming to build up the development and deployment of trustworthy, sustainable and human-centric AI, were announced, including a new EU-backed initiative, which puts the EU back into the spotlight of an intensifying global race for technology.

Background: EU throws its 5 cents to shift the AI frontier

In the words of Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Union, "Europe is forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises". And if anything, the last 3 years have been poignant: the geopolitical situation has changed drastically, and capacity-building and competitiveness have become 2 terms mentioned more and more frequently.

In case you hadn't noticed the tone shifting, the European Union is taking a much more active and independent stance towards a range of issues, and this includes digital skills and building up the overall capacity of the European continent to withstand future challenges. AI remains a gamechanger: hence the announcement of Ursula von der Leyer during the Paris summit - the launch of a new initiative, InvestAI. Watch the full keynote speech here.

InvestAI - from mobilising €200 billion to AI gigafactories in Europe

The newly-launched InvestAI initiative will mobilise €200 billion for investment in AI and set up a new fund of another €20 billion for AI gigafactories. This large AI infrastructure is needed to allow open, collaborative development of the most complex AI models and to make Europe an AI continent.

Ursula von der Leyen, Paris AI Summit 2025

The EU's InvestAI fund will finance a total of 4 future AI Gigafactories throughout the EU. The AI Gigafactories will excel in training complex, very large AI models. These models require an extensive computing infrastructure that allows for breakthroughs in specific key domains - like medicine, or science. The plan for the Gigafactories, which will be created is to ensure another 100.000 last-generation AI chips - 4 times more compared to the AI factories we have today.

“AI will improve our healthcare, spur our research and innovation and boost our competitiveness. We want AI to be a force for good and for growth. We are doing this through our own European approach – based on openness, cooperation and excellent talent. But our approach still needs to be supercharged. This is why, together with our Member States and with our partners, we will mobilise unprecedented capital through InvestAI for European AI gigafactories. 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.”
Ursula von der Leyen, Paris AI Summit 2025 - keynote speech

Europe as the leading AI continent

But that's not all. The gigafactories funded via InvestAI will effectively be "the largest public-private partnership in the world when it comes to the development and uptake of sustainable, trustworthy, and ethical AI.

By following the EU-established model of cooperative and open innovation that entails complex industrial and mission-critical applications, the initiative will ensure every company - and not just the biggest players - can leverage AI and take advantage of large-scale computing power that can help shape a future that's both digital and European.

Chips or coins? Securing funding for AI

Funding for InvestAI will include a layered fund, whereas initially the money will come from existing EU funding programmes with a digital component: namely the Digital Europe Programme, Horizon Europe, and InvestEU. EU countries can also participate to fund different projects. Through this mixture of grants and equity, InvestAI is essentially the first pilot case for strategic technologies following the Competitiveness Compass.

Earlier in December 2024, the Commission already announced 4 starting AI factories, with 5 more com ing soon. The existing support for AI Factories of €10 billion, co-financed by the EU and the Member States, is already the largest public investment in AI in the world, and will unlock over ten times more private investment. It already provides massive access for start-ups and industry to supercomputers.

Is AI up for grabs? EU ready to lead the global race

InvestAI is not the only action to boost EU-led innovation in key technologies. AI factories made up a large part of the Commission's innovation package presented in January 2024, together with:

Funding disbursed through the main instruments in Europe with digital components, i.e. the Digital Europe Programme and Horizon Europe with a focus on generative AI.
Additional initiatives formulate the basis of ensuring an EU talent pool with skilled AI experts through investment in education and training, up- and re-skilling actions, etc.
Strengthening both public and private investments in AI start-ups and scale-ups throughout the European Union, including venture capital or equity support.
Common European Data Spaces are being accelerated and made available to an EU-wide AI community, in which data is a key resource needed to train and improve AI models.
The ‘GenAI4EU' initiative is the last piece added to the puzzle. Its aim? To make possible the development of novel use cases and new, emerging applications within 1 or more of Europe's 14 industrial ecosystems, as well as the public sector. Application areas include robotics, health, biotech, manufacturing, mobility, climate and virtual worlds.

Other plans include setting up a European AI Research Council, in which Europeans pool resources to explore data's untapped potential to support the development of AI and other key technologies. The 'Apply AI' initiative is also in the works - driving industrial adoption of artificial intelligence in specific sectors.