The European Commission’s AI Continent Action Plan, launched on Wednesday, has five key elements: more computing infrastructure, greater data access, increased AI system adoption, a larger pool of AI experts, and a unified single market.
The Commission’s Action Plan is built around the expectation of a significant shift driven by increased use of data centers and data for AI. This approach is not new and has been embedded in the Communication on Fostering a European approach to Artificial Intelligence since at least 2021. The Commission has bought into the hype surrounding “artificial general intelligence (AGI)” and “frontier models,” terms popularized by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the Frontier Model Forum. The term “frontier model” is a rebranding of generative AI models and has been promoted by major tech companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Reflecting Big Tech’s “more data is good” ideology, the Commission plans to establish Data Labs, a surveillance infrastructure for pooling and securely sharing high-quality data, particularly health data, across the EU. Data Labs will “ensure that AI developers will have access to large volumes of high-quality data in health” from across the EU, potentially creating a database that could be difficult to dismantle and raising concerns about privacy.
The Commission will support a network of data centers with more than 100,000 advanced AI processors to train AI models. The plan includes tripling the EU’s data center capacity within the next five to seven years, which is likely to raise issues about energy and water usage. The advanced AI processors, most likely to be procured from Nvidia, will increase training and inference efficiency but also increase energy use and waste heat production. Consequently, the water required to cool the data centers will increase. Although the plan mentions considering “energy, water efficiency and circularity,” it is unclear what this consideration entails.
The EU has already planned the construction of 13 AI factories, each including updated supercomputers and data centers. The Commission’s plan repeats past announcements, and it does not prioritize open-source projects’ access to supercomputers despite acknowledging the benefits of open-source approaches. European users, including “startups, scaleups, SMEs,” will have priority access through EuroHPC, which includes users in the EU and associated countries like the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.
The Commission will back “Science for AI” and “AI in Science” to stimulate the utilization of AI for discovery and exploration across scientific fields. However, without clear scientific guidelines on how to use AI in specific domains, this approach could be more harmful than helpful. The Commission assumes that more deployment of AI systems will produce novel solutions and improve public services, but it overlooks the fact that “there is nothing that makes AI systems inherently good.”
