Europe’s AI Factories: Powering the future of ethical and reliable AI
With hubs across the continent, the EU’s AI Factories are bridging supercomputing, open data, and innovation
The advancements of Artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years have been transforming industries and societies globally. Most of the developments have been in the field of general-purpose AI (GPAI), which primarily focuses on generative AI using chatbots. The EU has therefore invested in the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) network of supercomputers, which are being adapted to train large-scale GPAI models and newer AI applications. These supercomputers are now being optimised in ecosystems known as AI Factories.
In December of 2024, the EuroHPC JU appointed seven consortia to establish the first AI Factories across Europe. These were deployed in Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, and Sweden. Since then, the total has gone up to 13 factories focused on offering free, customised support to SMEs and startups. Besides providing services in the European industry, AI Factories are working to support European scientific users in developing large AI models and enhance skills and knowledge in the domain of AI.
AI Factories are designed to facilitate access to larger datasets, including open data. This data is essential to train AI models and chatbots and help centralise data resources for ease of access. AI Factories are meant to act as intermediaries that help link the end-user to the open datasets relevant to them, which ultimately promotes the reuse of public sector data. These factories also enable data formats to be standardised, making open data more usable and interoperable across different AI systems and tools.
As Europe is working on AI integration in an ethical and innovative way in business practices, the role of AI factories is becoming increasingly important. By bridging the gap between advanced computing and open data, AI Factories empower startups, researchers, and public institutions to realise their potential using AI. Visit data.europa.eu to gain a better understanding of the impact that AI factories have on open data sharing, from weather analysis to benchmarking.
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