The topic united politicians across the French political spectrum. Edouard Philippe, former French prime minister under President Emmanuel Macron and a contender in next year’s presidential elections, urged Europe to “avoid the vassalization.”
He offered several policy options, such as a Buy European Tech Act, re-upping the French push to leverage government contracts to boost Europe’s tech sector, and preferential access to decarbonized electricity for European players.
French Digital Minister Anne Le Hénanff focused on AI’s significant energy needs, highlighting France’s advantage in that space.
“Thanks to abundant, decarbonized and competitive electricity, we are a natural home for the data centers and infrastructure that will drive the AI of tomorrow,” she said.
Other politicians focused on the need for Europe to quickly build up an offering of computing power, needed to train the most complex and advanced AI models.
German Greens MEP Sergey Lagodinsky pushed for the EU to team up with “middle powers,” such as Canada, Australia, Singapore and the U.K., “to pull together compute capacity through a consortium approach.”
He also said the Commission “must get serious” about its plan to build several AI gigafactories, massive AI compute hubs to train the models.
Océane Herrero contributed reporting.
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