was beaming with joy during a press conference with Microsoft President Brad Smith held on the sidelines of a special investment summit in Paris earlier in May.
The US software giant had just announced additional investments of €4 billion ($4.3 billion) in data centers and the (AI) sector in France until 2027.
“[Microsoft’s new] data centre will be one of Europe’s biggest and help us be one of the data storage and AI leaders,” Macron claimed.
Last summer, France published a national AI strategy with €500 million to be invested in the creation of AI clusters until 2030. A few months later, in December, Paris startup MistralAI joined the league of AI champions by becoming a so-called unicorn in the sector — companies valued at more than one billion dollars.
Europe lagging behind US and China heavyweights
Noah Greene from the AI Safety and Stability Project at Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) says the French government has “flipped a switch” when it decided to become an AI champion. But making that ambition a reality might be an uphill struggle, the research assistant told DW.
With the being the clear AI market leader, and coming second ahead of the UK, the backlog of EU leaders France and was not only down to technological factors, Greene said. “The US has been at the top of the game for so long that investors prefer to put their money here, as they know the institutional talent and infrastructure already exist.”
France meanwhile has a “very complex labor code and large US tech firms like Google have struggled at times to get past these laws,” he added.
France ‘has excellent AI researchers’
But Veronique Ventos, co-founder of Paris-based startup NukkAI, says she never considered French labor laws a hurdle.
“We always knew we’d set up our company in France with its excellent researchers and numerous support programs for startups,” Ventos, who used to works as an AI researcher at Paris-Saclay University, told DW.
Ventos claims the company’s AI is different from others because “humans are fully integrated.”
“They can observe its processes and are being told why the AI is making certain recommendations and decisions,” she explained adding that the technology was using considerably less data than other and thus is more energy-efficient.
At the moment, NukkAI has half a dozen clients, including French aerospace group Thales and the NATO defense organisation, which use the technology to plan their logistics.
The startup also closely cooperates with French universities that give NukkAI access to France’s Jean Zay supercomputer. Based in Saclay on the southwestern suburbs of Paris, Jean Zay is one of Europe’s most powerful with a capacity of 36.85 so-called petaflops — equivalent to several quadrillions of operations per second.
The race for computing power
Christine Dugoin, associate professor at Paris 1 Pantéon-Sorbonne University’s Artificial Intelligence Observatory and Risk Chair, thinks France, as well as all of Europe, need more and bigger supercomputers. “That’s the only way we’ll be able to compete in the area of AI,” she told DW.
Additional supercomputers will indeed be inaugurated this year and next in Jülich, Germany, and the Essonne department near Paris. The machines will be Europe’s first ones exceeding a capacity of one so-called exaflop per second, which is one quintillion operations.
“But we’ll still be lagging behind the US and China, which is now claiming to have overtaken the US with its new machine, Tianhe 3, supposedly surpassing a capacity of two exaflops, which would make it the world’s fastest,” Dugoin said.
She thinks a Europe-wide AI approach is needed — not only to deal with global competition. “Since Russia started invading Ukraine in 2022, it’s been deploying an AI-based disinformation campaign against Europe. The only way to fight back is by joining forces,” she said.
Joining AI forces in Europe
Munich, Germany-based defence AI company Helsing wants to do just that. Also a unicorn by market value, the firm was founded in 2021 and has offices in the UK and France.
Helsing Vice-President AI Antoine Bordes says the Ukraine war has shown that Western democracies are facing “an existential risk and need to strive for a form of common technological and defense sovereignty with AI at its center.”
Helsing analyzes amongst other things data from satellites or radars in real time and provides them to troops on the ground, in the air and at sea, also in Ukraine. Bordes told DW that for Europe to be able to catch up with the US and China it would require “a Europe-wide AI investment plan, also with regards to our computing capacity.”
Philippe Aghion, professor for economics at universities INSEAD and Collège de France in Paris and at the London School of Economics, shares Bordes’s view. In March, he co-authored a French government-commissioned report that called for more state investment in AI.
“The AI sector could boost French GDP by 0.8% per year over the coming ten years,” Aghion told DW, but that potential could only unfold if the government deploys “a proper industry policy and invests at least €25 billion” in thje sector.
Noah Greene, however, isn’t so sure that Europe will be able to use its potential. “The US has been implementing a ‘laissez-faire’ policy and putting in place as few hurdles as possible. The EU, by contrast, is aiming to become one of the leaders in the regulation of the technology to protect fundamental rights.”
And indeed, in March that bans the development of . Greene argues that only AI technology leaders will be able to “control the keys to the castle and decide how autocracies will use these products.”
Veronique Ventos from startup NukkAI xthinks that we shouldn’t even try compete with AI giants the likes of Google “in areas were they are clearly in another league” such as data storage. “We should rather focus on our own strengths, such as in France technologies that combine AI with robotics.”
Edited by: Uwe Hessler
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