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French billionaire Xavier Niel is investing €200mn in artificial intelligence to ensure Europe remains competitive in the innovation race against the US and China. The investment will be made through Niel’s telecoms group Iliad and will include projects such as a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia, a research center in Paris, and an annual AI conference at Station F, Niel’s start-up campus in the French capital.
“To influence the AI market, you need computing power. To have computing power, you need supercomputers. And to have supercomputers, you have to invest massively,” said Niel in a statement.
Through its cloud computing subsidiary Scaleway, Iliad has been working on developing a European alternative cloud system in competition with major US-based tech companies. “By equipping it with a supercomputer, we want — and we can — create a European AI champion. It’s a question of sovereignty: to protect our data, we need platforms established on our territory,” Niel added.
The race to develop AI expertise has intensified geopolitical rivalries as Europe tries to keep up with heavy investment by US and Chinese competitors. Policymakers view AI development as a matter of sovereignty.
Niel aims to build a French AI ecosystem that can rival OpenAI in the US. He wants his research lab to draw on the expertise of graduates from France’s top schools, similar to OpenAI’s development of the language model chatbot ChatGPT. This push for AI development aligns with French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement of €500mn in funding to support French generative AI projects and the open-source movement.
However, as Europe strives to establish a foothold in generative AI, policymakers and politicians are also focused on regulating the technology to avoid negative consequences experienced with previous innovations like social media.
“It is not enough to create a champion, but an entire French ecosystem. Because we want to contribute to it, we are going to create an AI research laboratory, providing the means and recruiting the best researchers,” said Niel.
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