Europe wants startups to do AI with supercomputers

IT IS NOT just technology firms that are fighting over the AI pie. Countries, too, want a bigger slice. As with companies, national spoils are unevenly distributed. If America is big tech, Europe looks more like an early-stage startup. Whereas America boasts many computing clusters of more than 20,000 top-end AI chips, in Europe a 1,000-processor facility counts as big. The EU hopes to give its AI startups a boost by tapping its growing fleet of supercomputers. This idea was one of the themes of the EuroHPC Summit, which drew Europe’s supercomputing experts to Antwerp on March 18th-21st. The gathering drew less attention than the concomitant “Woodstock of AI” hosted in Silicon Valley by Nvidia, the unstoppable maker of AI chips. But for Europe’s AI ambitions, the meeting in Belgium may end up playing an important role.

After falling behind America and China in supercomputing, in 2018 the EU launched EuroHPC, a bloc-wide project to expand number-crunching capacity. The outfit is set to spend nearly €8bn ($8.7bn) between 2018 and 2027 on a dozen or so new supercomputers. Of the nine already built, three rank among the world’s ten most powerful machines. They have lifted Europe’s share of global supercomputing power from 15% in 2020 to 22%. In September Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, declared that this oomph would be made available to European AI startups free of charge.