EU to mobilize 200B Euros to invest in AI
87 comments
·February 12, 2025meinersbur
I am urprised how much money suddenly is available where other future-critical projects are starved of funding while needing just a fraction of that amount, specifically nuclear fusion.
myrmidon
What makes fusion research "future critical"? I honestly don't see any realistic timeline where fusion energy contributes >10% to any nations electricity grid in 2040.
Sure, throwing money at the problem might accelerate things marginally, but you might as well build out renewables, battery storage and invest into grid connectivity, with greater effect (over the next decades), less risk and faster RoI.
bArray
It's the same in the UK. Pensioners had their heating allowance removed to plug a £22 bn 'black hole', whilst tonnes of money is pledged to AI. I can imagine the EU is in a similar state.
voidr
The UK is also sending eye-watering amounts of money to Ukraine without a problem, while everyone else is pulling out of the project.
There was also the plan go give the Chagos islands to a country that is ~2000km away and pay them billions for the privilege of using them.
There is always money to chase newspaper headlines.
mogoh
I was with you until your last two words.
danmaz74
Nuclear fusion has no clear path to reach viability with just a fraction of that amount, not even close.
trueismywork
Nuclear fusion definitely needs more than a trillion
jycr753
It's wasted money if they don't change their level of bureaucracy
randunel
Indeed.
The EU grants are ridiculously red tapey. Companies have entire departments dedicated to the red tape that European grants require, from the initial participation / auction with hundreds or thousands of pages of documentation, through various stages of thorough checkbox ticking, to the final reception of the project.
Only the usual players with well established "EU Funds" departments can realistically get them, such as Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Microsoft etc.
ivan_gammel
I have seen (and worked in) a number of startups that did receive research grants including AI research in Germany. This notion of terrible European bureaucracy is exaggerated. It’s not worse than anywhere else in the world.
randunel
I've helped the EU Funds departments at my previous employer with auctions participation and other similar checkbox ticking exercises, they're impossible to navigate for regular companies.
I suppose the amount of red tape depends on the type of grant. In my case, I once helped with national level grants to enhance the border protection systems, deployment throughout an entire country. The amount of time and effort to simply participate in such an auction was absolutely ridiculous.
In any case, none of the auctions or checkbox ticking exercises would have been manageable by startups, companies definitely need entire departments dedicated to these funds, and I'm not referring to project management, but strictly red tape.
valenterry
As a German, I have to disagree. The bureaucracy both of Germany and the EU is terrible. I have multiple friends who left Germany, and the bureaucracy played a significant role.
a99c43f2d565504
I have no experience in this whatsoever but I feel like it's good to have some transparent bureoucracy even if it's slightly inconvenient if the alternative is to toss around billions in an opaque and corrupt manner like the way bookkeeping (or lack thereof) in global scale climate funds works. Note that I don't have experience in the latter either nor sources to give, yet this is the impression I have. Feel free to correct.
yvdriess
Can confirm. I experienced EU EC research project red tape to similar than DARPA.
Most of the red tape comes from excesses or abuses from the past. Government agencies tend to slap an extra layer of rules every time the grant money is being misused.
Those kind of rules also reveal what is being interpreted as misuse or abuse. For instance, you cannot expense a meal that includes an alcoholic beverage on an US federal budget.
pantalaimon
Those grants are then likely on the state level, not EU level.
scrollaway
I work with EU grants and it’s really not. The amount of wasted work that goes into them is insane. Admin overhead is massive and it’s spent not just from the grants but also from all the companies that apply and don’t get them.
cbg0
> Only the usual players with well established "EU Funds" departments can realistically get them, such as Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Microsoft etc.
This is not true, you just have to do a bit more effort to have all your paperwork in order.
tmnvdb
I disagree, I did an EU subsidy request when I was 18, it was quite simple and well organized.
FinnLobsien
I am European and I tend to agree. The way it's currently going, it'll self-select for people who are good at filling out forms, which will either be the giant companies that can afford to hire what are effectively tax-funded civil servants (they happen to be employed by companies, but only exist because of the government and are effectively a tax on business).
Or there'll be a common European subgenre of "startups" that exclusively draw funding from EU/govs because they're great at filling out forms and telling paper pushers what they want to hear. Then they ship some hypercompliant product nobody wants to use.
edhelas
That's why we need Elon to come to Europe and get rid of all those regulations and restrictions! We need a European DOGE!
null
Zoadian
no, we don't. regulations and restrictions are useful.
jycr753
Some regulations are definitely good—like food quality standards—when applied correctly and without giving a free pass to other countries (e.g., Morocco, Ukraine).
But then you have bad regulations, such as NIS, salary "transparency," nuclear energy restrictions, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act, and Farm to Fork, among others.
On top of that, there’s the massive cost to taxpayers just to keep those people in Brussels.
edhelas
[Sarcasm]
rdm_blackhole
This kind of blanket statements are never correct.
cm2187
Tax it, regulate it, and when it stops moving, subsidise it!
kreetx
That is how it feels sometimes. The regulators want to be in control, as if "they are responsible for anything good that comes", while the truth is that they are only able to somewhat restrict or nudge a process, while any strong process will happen regardless of it.
kreetx
I get the feeling that this might be spent on overpriced chips, so EU will not get much value for money.
tiberius_p
We need to invest in defense not in AI.
_ink_
Sadly, AI will be needed for defense.
tiberius_p
Yes, but what kind of AI? LLM chatbots or military robotics? LLMs seem to be drawing most of the money these days and I don't think that should be the focus of the EU. We need advanced drones and anti-drone defense systems, advanced air defense against hypersonic missiles and glided aviation bombs, high precision artillery systems, anti-tank weapons. I don't see LLMs making any breakthroughs in those fields. Maybe transformer neural networks can be tuned to solve some prediction problems in these areas. Maybe some vision models can be tuned to detect and track aerial threats, or movements of troops. My point is, we need investment in AI for defense not in customer support chatbots. Unless it's chatbots that generate smart military moves on the battle field...we don't need them. Let the Americans and the Chinese play with their chit-chatbots. We have bigger fish to fry.
guiriduro
Yes, that's what the arms manufacturers want. Let's not do (much of) that.
rad_gruchalski
why not? we’ll be throwing rainbow flags at Russians when they decide to invade?
ossobuco
The only current threat to EU territory is from USA to Greenland.
There is no threat from Russia, as Ukraine certainly isn't part of EU and Russia has never shown hostility to EU, except in retaliation from EU hostile acts.
So I would agree we need to become capable of defending ourselves, but to do so we should very quickly normalize and reestablish friendly relations with Russia and China, then make ourselves economically independent from the USA, ask them to remove all of their military bases from EU, and start to produce our own weapons.
sgt101
More likely "reparations" - €500bn a year or we're coming to Berlin !
Genuinely - this is a one way bet for the Russians, smash up Estonia and extort the Germans, spend the money on more guns and then kill all the Poles.
Coming to a continent near you soon!
singularity2001
people (even here) lack the fantasy to guarantee peace without armament.
jajko
I agree, I think they are trying to cargo-cult Silicon Valley ecosystem without realizing that it will never have a chance in European's clueless bureaucracy, massive social safety nets etc. It doesn't mean nothing can be built, but it won't ever be as effective and bleeding edge for various good and bad reasons and mere fraction of whatever goals aimed for.
And defense spending is a must, how in 2025 they could NOT invest easily 5% of GDP into security is beyond me, thats not a bad requirement from trump actually (if some time is given to reshuffle budgets). There are threats from all sides - one genocidal dictator on our borders repeatedly keeps stating how he will wipe out few hundreds of millions with atomic bombs aimed at our cities. Inner threats with Hungary and Slovakia now.
Then there are global threats, be it China or maybe even US if trade wars will go on 100%, and who knows what Turkey actually wants. Yet Leyden's blind focus on green deal when whole world literally abandoned it, killing our industries while making 0 difference long term is... I don't have a nice word for it. If there is actually some sound logic behind those moves she failed remarkably with communicating them to literally everybody.
piltdownman
Didn't Cambridge-alumni and London based researcher Sir Demis Hassabis - who co-founded Google DeepMind btw - just win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Comparing the enterprise value of the top 10 companies in Europe versus the U.S provides a poor insight into the actual health of AI research as opposed to capital generation. Both DeepMind and Featurespace are European startups for example.
ivewonyoung
Nobody's arguing that the talent isn't there, but it's very hard to commercialize results compared to the US. Which is why a good chunk are employed in US companies or immigrate to the US.
rdm_blackhole
They can't invest 5% of GDP in defense because they don't have the money. Germany does not want to raise it's debt ceiling and France is basically broke and hasn't had a functioning government for the last 7 months.
NATO has been treated as a free ride by Europe.
They were supposed to invest a certain % of their GDP each year in their defense spending but because the US was always there as backstop, they basically never did.
Now a lot of countries in the EU have to play catch up and make up the under investment of the last 20 years which will take many years and even possibly decades before it is reversed.
Also Macron is on his way out and the most likely politician to come after him is from the far right. His voice and power is waning and since he has lost the majority in the assembly, he is a lame duck with very little power to change things.
rvnx
The irony is that if we don't invest into defense, war would still likely break-out, but we may suffer less (or die less) because of a quick loss.
Now we have a weak army in the EU, if Russia invades one of our friends, then the war will be over in two days because France, Germany, USA will do their usual "we condemn blablabla, we send you prayers and sympathy", but there would be no long-lasting war.
A bit similar to Ukraine, it's a half-assed initiative, drowning billions of USD, but not efficient enough.
If the answer had been much stronger, it would have worked, but now we get the worst of the two options (doing nothing, or going all-in).
Also not to forget, that at the end of the rifle, it's not people saving their house, it's about protecting a system that supports the wealth of politics.
The main difference for the invaded people would be to whom they pay taxes, and ironically, could now be facing sanctions from their supposed friends (like the living folks in Crimea, who got punished by US/EU; punished because they have been invaded and victims of a war).
In the second case, if EU defense is increased moderately (like currently plans), war would still breakout but it may drag for longer, and casualties without increasing odds of winning.
The third case, where EU alone without the US is significantly stronger than China, Russia and North Korea, it's nice but I don't see it happening.
Like you said, Macron is likely going to be replaced with pro-Russian Le Pen / Zemmour-like.
The world is getting dangerous.
dauertewigkeit
The thinking in Europe when it comes to AI, is "AI for industry", or "AI for science". Like they think of AI as providing a supporting role in industry or science, but they do not think of AI as a goal in itself. This thinking is analogous to the way EU leadership treated "tech" for the past three decades and look how well that turned out for us...
If we had good leadership, these funds would be used to setup 2 or 3 competing AI labs. Forget all that "AI for industry" and "AI for science" nonsense and just catch up to the US and China, and have something competitive, for once.
tmnvdb
The big difference is that this is a top-down gov run iniative, it will by nature be very different than a free market iniative.
olivierduval
Sadly, that money will be wasted:
* that money will go to "big corp" who know and have to time to build application forms... even if they don't have the knowledge ("take the money and run")
* that money wont to the "real disruptors" that are small corps because they don't have time or knowledge to build application forms to get the money
pantalaimon
Only big corp have the capacity to comply with EU regulation in the first place.
cbg0
There's typically much less red tape for smaller funding programs from the EU, so if you're only getting a couple hundred thousand you'll deal with a lot less requirements than a company getting tens of millions. There's still bureaucracy, but it's not as insurmountable as some make it out to be.
pantalaimon
AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act still apply
bloomingkales
EU can always get a discount on that once they ratchet up regulations. I don’t understand Europe, why don’t they just focus on hyper growth with limited oversight like America?
cbg0
> I don’t understand Europe, why don’t they just focus on hyper growth with limited oversight like America?
Well, you've kind of answered it yourself, because the EU is not America. It's an economic and political union formed of very different countries with diverse interests, though those interests primarily are centered around the individual and their rights, and not the corporations' profits, like America is.
And yes, I know it's an oversimplification.
rdm_blackhole
Oh please not this again.
You think the EU cares about it's citizens rights when it's been trying for the last 3 years to pass the Chat Control law in order to read all your emails, text messages, analyze all your photos and basically treat you as criminal without having any recourse about it?
Is this the kind of rights we are talking about just to be clear?
cbg0
Don't make ridiculous generalizations based on a bad example. Right to repair, strong consumer rights, net neutrality, and more can't be discounted because you dislike a proposal.
apeescape
EU is not a homogeneous single entity. Every state is driving their own agenda, and every state is divided into multiple parties often pulling in different directions. It slows down decision-making, in both good and bad. Oftentimes it's hard to sell a Pan-European long-term benefit, if it's cost is that some member states have to lose something in the short term.
You could make the argument that similar problems exist in the US too, but I'd argue it's worse in the EU.
tmnvdb
There is no European (capital) market and the national markets are too small to compete with the US or China. European companies are therefore unlikely to gain trust from investors that they will be able to compete.
Hence these kinds of top-down iniatives are in a sense the best they can do given rather poor ircumstances for private investment.
jycr753
I believe it's because they have this massive monster in Brussels that needs something to do (chiringuitos) to extract the maximum amount of money—corruption.
igorkraw
In the spirit of HN rules, actual answering instead of snark:
1. The memory of Nazis using centralised industrial might and information to kill millions of people (google dutch insurance records Nazis)
2.a much stronger history of workers rights and distrust of rich people together with a different attitude to gouvernement making it politically challenging
Can hate it or love it, but the median life expectancy in Europe is much less correlated with wealth and _I think_ is higher from memory, child hunger and food insecurity is much lower and homelessness and other corporate abuse is much less of a problem corrected for wealth and population.
Whether we manage to keep this remains to be seen, but I think it's a reasonable set of different preferences
FirmwareBurner
No offence but those arguments are all silly.
>1. The memory of Nazis using centralised industrial might and information to kill millions of people (google dutch insurance records Nazis)
We can't stop developing and using modern technology just because one time in the past modern technology was used to kill people. Imagine if prehistoric humans stopped using fire because one time some retard burned down the village, or if they stopped forging steel because swords were used to kill people one time. People kill people, not technology alone.
And people who bring in the Nazi atrocities as a joker card against progress in an argument, usually do it for emotional manipulation to move the goalposts and push an agenda, similar to "won't someone think of the children" to push online surveillance. Most normal people don't think of the Nazi atrocities at every decision they make in life, most people think about the problems we have right now.
>2.a much stronger history of workers rights and distrust of rich people together with a different attitude to gouvernement making it politically challenging
Yeah well the problem is it's always the capitalistic rich people that create jobs and drive innovation. Putting the government in charge of creating jobs and innovations don't end up working well long term.
bloomingkales
Most normal people don't think of the Nazi atrocities at every decision they make in life, most people think about the problems we have right now.
I don't want to get too Hitler ad reductio, but that's probably what the Nazis thought too. It hasn't even been a 100 years since this all happened man. It's only sociopaths that constantly play up the past is the past nonsense. There's an incredible bravado to it. It's not the past, it was barely yesterday. The only thing I'll grant you is that its probably not happening again only because in the grand time line, less than 100 years is pretty much still happening, we're still INSIDE the chaos of ww2 and nazism. The same way we are all still inside the big bang, expanding outward.
But yes, sociopaths need to forget this, similar to how they need to forget an affair or a crime. It is what it is.
fbn79
Of this, €20bn will be earmarked for AI gigafactories. This reminds me of Northvolts. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/northvolts-struggles-cautio...
FirmwareBurner
What's an "AI gigafactory"?
highcountess
[dead]
danmaz74
Wow, I just read all the comments which are currently here (at my time of reading), and the level is worse than on Reddit. Not the HN I remember...
Talking about the actual news, as usual with this kinds of programs, a lot of the money won't bring results, but that's also true for most investments from VCs. If just a few good ventures come out of it, that's already a great result. Trump is showing that the EU simply can't outsource most of its IT to the US, it's just too risky.
rdm_blackhole
You do understand the difference between VC money and government money right?
As a citizen of the EU I care greatly when governments spend money that for one they do not have, therefore saddling me and everyone else with more debt,and two when that money is spent not in the most efficient manner but given to the established players who can fill forms the proper way as highlighted in the numerous comments above yours.
If a VC like Softbank blows 100B on a bad investment It doesn't affect me but when its my hard earned tax money that could have been spent on other things, then it matters very greatly.
rigelbm
Meanwhile Europe still doesn't have a cloud hyperscaler, so most of these €200B will end up in the coffers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the real winners.
Here's the source:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
• strengthen the EU's generative AI talent pool through education, training, skilling and reskilling activities;
• encouragement of public and private investments in AI start-ups and scale-ups, including through venture capital or equity support
• development and deployment of Common European Data Spaces, made available to the AI community
• GenAI4EU: support the development of novel use cases and emerging applications in Europe's 14 industrial ecosystems
• expansion of computing infrastructure to "100 000 last-generation AI chips"
Overall it sounds very similar to last year's announcement:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...