• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 11, 2025

European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched InvestAI, an initiative to invest €200 billion in AI, during the AI Action Summit in Paris on Monday.

The project requires collaboration and includes a European fund of €20 billion for AI gigafactories. The EU is courting the private sector to support much needed compute-capacity to train large AI models.

"Too often I hear Europe is late to the race -- the United States and China have already gotten ahead," she said. "I disagree."

Giving a speech, von der Leyen encouraged the potential of homegrown AI startups but said the region’s developers must have access to an infrastructure that is powerful enough to enable them to scale their innovations to fulfill the potential offered by the technology.

In order to do this, the EU wants to change the model for supporting AI infrastructure.

“Some time ago I launched the idea of a CERN of AI, to mark the similarities with a successful cooperative model,” she said during the speech. "CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which “has enabled countless breakthrough innovations, including the World Wide Web. Of course there are differences. For AI, we need the private sector to be fully involved in our gigafactories. And we need more capital to make it happen.”

Following up on her remarks on Tuesday, von der Leyen announced the EU would invest €50 billion for AI on top of the €150 billion commitment — all aimed at driving regional adoption of applied AI made by a coalition of private sector companies organized under EU AI Champions.

U.S. companies on Monday made a similar announcement to support online safety. Google, OpenAI and children’s gaming platform Roblox were among the firms backing a nonprofit initiative to provide free online safety tools to firms worldwide.

The announcement -- made at the Paris AI summit on Monday -- launched Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) focused on collaborating on an open-source project for the era of artificial intelligence (AI). 

This week, Rutgers University released findings from a study that suggests trust in AI is higher than trust in social media. The study found that some 47% trust AI to benefit the public, compared with 39% who trust social media for the same purpose.

The study found that men seem to trust AI more than women at 52% vs. 43%, respectively, and that 53% of urban residents are more trusting compared to 38% of those in rural areas -- mostly because they encounter AI more often and are more familiar with the technology.