Europe's supercomputing body has officially added a new pillar to its strategy – to develop and operate AI Factories to drive "a more competitive and innovative" European AI ecosystem.
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) Governing Board met at the end of last week to amend its Work Program to include this AI Factories objective.
This follows the entry into force of EU Regulation 2024/1732, which expanded the EuroHPC JU's mandate to acquire and operate dedicated AI-optimized supercomputers to serve a diverse range of users including startups, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), industry, academia, and the public sector.
It also follows on from an earlier decision by the European Commission that greater support was needed for "responsible" research and innovation in AI within the region to make available the bloc's HPC capacity to startups and others, providing "trustworthy" AI resources with which to train their models.
According to the Commission, AI Factories are envisioned as "dynamic ecosystems" that bring together all the necessary ingredients – compute power, data, and talent – to create cutting-edge generative AI models, so it isn't just about making a supercomputer available and telling people to get on with it.
The ultimate goal for these AI Factories is that they will serve as hubs able to drive advances in AI across various key domains, from health to energy, manufacturing to meteorology, it said.
To get there, the EuroHPC JU says that its AI Factories approach aims to create a one-stop shop for startups, SMEs, and scientific users to facilitate access to services as well as skill development and support.
In addition, an AI Factory will also be able to apply for a grant to develop an optional system/partition focused on the development of experimental AI-optimized supercomputing platforms. The goal of such platforms would be to stimulate the development and design of a wide range of technologies for AI-ready supercomputers.
The EuroHPC JU says it will kick off a two-pronged approach to delivering AI Factories from September. One will be a call for new hosting agreements for the acquisition of a new AI supercomputer, or for an upgraded supercomputer in the case applicants aim to upgrade an existing EuroHPC supercomputer to have AI capabilities.
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This track will be implemented via a permanent Call for Expression of Interest for new hosts to deploy and operate an AI Factory.
According to the EuroHPC JU, grants will be offered to cover the operational costs of the supercomputers, as well as to support AI Factory activities and services.
The second prong is aimed at entities that already host a EuroHPC supercomputer capable of training large-scale, general-purpose AI models and emerging AI applications. It will also offer grants to support AI Factory activities.
All of this depends upon funding, and the EU's financial contribution for acquiring new or upgraded EuroHPC AI supercomputers is estimated at €400 million ($433 million) for 2024. Up to €800 million ($866 million) will be committed by the EU until 2027, according to EuroHPC, subject to budget availability from the Digital Europe program funds.
But the EU isn't the only proponent of AI Factories. Leading GPU manufacturer Nvidia is also understandably keen on pushing the concept.
At Computex in Taipei in June, CEO Jensen Huang described these as datacenters specially built to handle the most computationally intensive AI processing tasks.
"The next industrial revolution has begun. Companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia to shift the trillion-dollar traditional datacenters to accelerated computing and build a new type of datacenter – AI Factories – to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence," he opined.
Speaking in Japan earlier this month, Huang claimed: "The AI Factory will become the bedrock of modern economies across the world."
Or for as long as industry is prepared to keep pumping billions into AI, of course. ®