The Commission’s final draft of the Competitiveness Compass includes plans to establish new public-private “AI Gigafactories” to train very large AI models, in a change from a previous draft.

On Tuesday, Euractiv reported that a near-final draft of the EU’s landmark plan to boost its ailing economy described the planned €1.96 billion AI factories initiative as “mega”, despite being outmatched by the 250-times larger Stargate project announced by the United States.

Experts have long called for the Commission to take the lead on a similarly scaled public-private initiative. One said the EU executive needed to “knock a few big company heads together,” and bring political and regulatory momentum.

The call might now have been heard.

In the final draft of the Compass, seen by Euractiv ahead of publication today, the Commission no longer describes the AI factories as “mega.” Instead, it says the Commission will “mobilise public and private initiative to establish new AI Gigafactories,” also not in the previous draft.

The initiative would create large data centres specialised to train “very large AI models” to boost European AI development, as part of the EU Cloud and AI Development Act, which according to the document is planned for 2026.

It is not immediately clear from the draft whether the new ‘gigafactories’ are substantially different in size or scope than the AI factories. The prefix ‘giga-‘ denotes a value 1000 times larger than that of the prefix ‘mega-‘.

[OM]