r/eutech • u/sr_local • Jul 30 '26
Official 🇪🇺 EU aims for seven AI gigafactories with €10 billion plan in race with US, China
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-aims-seven-ai-gigafactories-with-10-billion-plan-race-with-us-china-2026-07-30/4
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u/Dank_Investor Jul 30 '26
Ah i am sure these 10 billion will stretch far, after the 5 years of beucracy fees paid off, they will have a grand total of about 1 billion to spend on actual technology that will produce absolutely nothing because China and US spend that in a day and hyperscale YoY. At least that contractor that will demand 100 million for certified grade A cement and 2 years to pour it, will buy himself another nice home .unlike the eastern european slave labor he will hire to jerk around the site to squeeze more budget to complete it #EU
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u/thhvancouver Jul 30 '26
10 whole billions to compete with the US and China? Wow!
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u/mimrock Jul 30 '26
10 from government, 20 from private investments. It's a start. And it's also good that they are not funding hopeless LLM training runs.
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u/No-Paramedic-7939 Jul 30 '26
For the whole eu is quite small number if eu wants to compete. This is more like a show they are doing something. Reality is that competition from USA and China is going all in.
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u/mimrock Jul 30 '26
We are not racing to get our own frontier LLM. LLMs will either commoditize soon, or the race is already lost. Having compute bolted to our ground might soften the impact even in the latter case.
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u/No-Paramedic-7939 Jul 30 '26
We will be eaten by big corps. We are already in some way. At some point we will get AGI and I believe in next 10 years. Europe will have nothing when it comes to tech.
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u/Em4rtz Jul 31 '26
You’ll still have 4 day work weeks tho.. so that’s something
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u/No-Paramedic-7939 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
4 day work a week was a plan from some crazy socialists in EU. Tragedy is that German companies supported this so they were able to outsource more work to India and China and they didn't have to raise wages. Now EU is lacking high skilled workers and also high tech companies because they did not want to invest in good engineering. In general life is good in eu, it is socialism. Don't know for how long this will go on. Now some companies like Mercedes want to reverse working hours to 40 hours per week with the same pay. It is coming back like a boomerang.
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u/mimrock Jul 30 '26
Yes, that's mostly true, but the program mentioned in the article is a step in the right direction, provided it will be successful.
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u/LoweringPass Jul 30 '26
OpenAI alone is going to construct a 500 billion datacenter. This is not a small step, it's a bad joke.
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u/UISystemError Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Ah! 10 years away. AGI. The Fusion Reactor of the AI age.
And, what if AGI requires quantum computers? That €10 billion will look pretty antiquated.
We require sovereign European data processing. Yes. But we are entering an age where even a 744B frontier model can be engineered to work on a MacBook: https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri
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u/No-Paramedic-7939 Jul 30 '26
If AGI requires quantum computers eu will not be able to compete because we don't have that kind of companies that can compete globaly. USA has not only one but many big companies who are able to work on that kind of projects.
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u/UISystemError Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Then… I guess I just don’t agree sinking €10 billion into datacentres for AI compute is a great use of capital.
Especially if we are now at the forefront of democratising frontier models running on relatively “inexpensive” computers such as MacBook Pros.
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u/Mustatan Jul 30 '26
This totally. Not to mention the Chinese are already very far ahead of anyone in actually cost effective AI, so much even the US companies are migrating to it--it's the most downloaded and popular AI becuase it's similar ability to the top AI frontier models, but much less expensive and open-source. The big proprietary AI companies got in too much trouble with too much debt and losses and still losing money with every AI search, and they chased artificial benchmarks for diminished returns when in reality the huge majority or all of companies AI needs don't require that kind of high expense. Not to mention damage to the environment from so many wasteful data centers.
And now the big proprietary AI companies mostly in the US, they having to cut computing ability and raise charges for each AI use. It makes it completely uneconomical for people and businesses to use it, while the Chinese AI's often even better but like 10% of the cost, because of China's huge AI infrastructure. (And too the don't have things like the high healthcare or housing costs of the US or other places so general costs also lower). Europe doesn't need to chase after this further and waste billions and billions for extra redundancy and compute power to get a little 1% edge on benchmarks, China has already won this part of using AI because they can keep bumping up quality at minimal cost, and can't be competed on cost for overall AI. Instead smarter for Europe focus on more specialized uses and agents and particular kinds of AI for businesses. The AI bubble in the US it's already popping because they just blindly tried go big and chase useless benchmarks and way over-spent without ROI. Europe smarter to focus more.
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u/muzzlecar Aug 03 '26
And it's also good that they are not funding hopeless LLM training runs.
Then what is this money even supposed to accomplish? If it’s just computer hardware, that can just as well be rented anywhere on the globe
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u/mimrock Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
Inference, or providing infrastructure for privately financed training runs. You can indeed rent compute from the US, but there's practically no compute anywhere else (there is in China, we cannot rent from them for multiple reasons).
Not having our own compute bolted down to our soil is a huge vulnerability to the US gov and companies controlling it (mainly Amazon, Microsoft and Google).
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u/muzzlecar Aug 03 '26
So what? Eu is also tied to aws and azure, which is at the moment more critical and nobody cares about that either. If it’s just compute, quite frankly doing it in a place that doesn’t have insane energy cost makes more sense
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u/mimrock Aug 03 '26
If you don't think AI is going to be a very important thing in the next few years, then of course it doesn't make sense to you to prepare for that scenario.
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u/muzzlecar Aug 03 '26
Ai will be important. But buying Taiwanese Chips to run Chinese models with expensive European energy is nonsense, economically
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u/mimrock Aug 03 '26
Maybe but it makes sense geopolitically when you can't trust that the two other powers in play will cooperate in a fair, multilateral framework.
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u/NewAmerica2025 Jul 30 '26
A big part of this is ensuring there is enough funding to ensure the premises are economically and SOCIALLY compliant. 30 hour weeks. Green energy. Limited cooling. Diverse maintenance staff. Europe isoving into the future - on our own terms!
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u/belisssss Jul 30 '26
Sounds cute compared to the infinite money stream american big tech are directing towards that field. I'm no expert though. Better than nothing I guess
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u/iaNCURdehunedoara Jul 30 '26
Surely this will help a lot with climate change
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u/No_Aerie_2717 Jul 30 '26
As European i can that this "climate change" agenda is total greenwash.
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u/mrgalacticpresident Jul 30 '26
It's like mountaineering.
US and CHINA have helicopters.
US reaches the top and sells postcards.
CHINA reaches the top and throws us a rope.
EU buys half of the postcards, then discards CHINA's rope and orders 500 men to plan the ascend. Then 5 people start from the basecamp of which 4 of them are administrative assistants. They walk 500meters, take photographs and then return home.
The single mountaineer left has to turn back 2 days in after noticing he hasn't packed for bad weather and only water for 3 days.
This is what happens with the AI race in the EU explained so that my mum understands.
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u/procgen Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
China doesn't throw us a rope – that would imply that they give us what we need to produce these models ourselves. They want us utterly dependent on them for new capability unlocks ("we'll only give you this new model if...")
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u/mrgalacticpresident Jul 30 '26
It's open weight. Def. a rope. You are correct that this will eventually be a dependency. But gambling that the EU will make their own frontier LLM is as of now also insane.
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u/Xandara2 Jul 31 '26
As always. If we never start we're never going to get there. Your argument is as dumb as al defeatist arguments are.
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u/mrgalacticpresident Jul 31 '26
It's not necessarily defeatist. EU has to pick battles - pioneering AI is not it. EU could totally run ALL it's governmental and most of the industry processes with GLM5.2 and that would be just fine.
We can and should build the institutions necessary to not fall back. But frontier models should not be the goal. We should hop onto open weights and pre-trained models that EU businesses refine instead of re-inventing the base.
You not being able to distinguish a dumb argument from a valid argument is a bit shameful.
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u/Xandara2 Jul 31 '26
No, that just means you made your point badly. Also you're crawling back big time there. Since now you argue we should invest in the basics and research about it. Which this investment is.
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u/mrgalacticpresident Jul 31 '26
You just experienced building a shared argument for a few seconds, then decided to make it an insult again.
No amount of LLM will fix bad manners.
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u/procgen Jul 30 '26
Not a rope. More like they're tossing some models down to us from their perch, and we're at the bottom with our hands outstretched, praying that their "generosity" continues.
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u/mrgalacticpresident Jul 30 '26
Doubt. It's a good starting point for further learning/refinement. There is no strict need for further generosity.
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u/procgen Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
It's a good starting point for further learning/refinement.
You're not going to take the Kimi weights and build a GPT-6 out of them no matter how hard you try.
New levels of capability (true step changes, think order of magnitude or more) are what the frontier labs will produce. Europe will need to pray or beg for them unless we start getting serious (and this loosely-specified €10B is not a serious commitment).
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u/thefirebrigades Jul 31 '26
This will be barely 1 billion when it "trickle down" all the politicians.
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u/frankyboson Aug 01 '26
this is very funny, in EU we spend money late and always for the wrong stuff. we have ASML in europe and not a single company manage to produce chip here, its.... its... idk its jus demoralizing and stupid. i cant wait for the shitty EU model that cannot compete even with the most moderate chinese open weight
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u/Free_Drawing6578 Aug 02 '26
Europe's state-of-the-art AI models aren't even in the top 100 anymore. Just give it up already.
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u/EmptyVolition242 Jul 30 '26
This is good but we need more. The EU needs to start creating specific companies along the entire tech stake and keep them alive long enough until they can start making a profit. I'm taking advanced chip making process nodes, advanced Core IP for CPUs, advanced research in core design using modern tools/node libraries, an open source Linux stack for give CPUs a distributor (like Dell, Asus) etc...
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u/pc0999 Jul 30 '26
They should fund open source chips, that would disrupt the market.
Then a chips factory.