French businessman announces mega investment in artificial intelligence

French businessman Xavier Niel, owner of the Iliad technology group, on Tuesday announced strategic investments designed to create a "European champion" of artificial intelligence (AI).

Xavier Niel in the Station F start-up hub in Paris. Reuters

Estimated at €200 million, the investment would go towards the purchase of a supercomputer and the creation of a dedicated research laboratory, Niel told French news agency AFP on Tuesday.

The idea is to able to offer a wide range of services to companies wishing to develop their own applications in the field.

This comes as Europe plays catch up to the United States in the race for artificial intelligence, to match the billions of dollars spent by the American giants Google, Microsoft and Meta.

"For artificial intelligence to work, you need three things: researchers, computing power and companies that exploit all of that," Niel said.

The EU wants to boost its supercomputer capacity AFP

"We really need that, to be sure to have things coming out of here, (...) so as not to have all of our data going elsewhere, so that the AI ​​does not depend on algorithms not created here and which are not European," he explained.

To achieve this objective, Iliad acquired a supercomputer from Nvidia, the American processor giant, to provide Scaleway, its cloud computing service provider subsidiary, with "the greatest computing power" on the continent.

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Iliad also revealed on Tuesday the creation of a research laboratory of excellence in AI in Paris, already endowed with "more than €100 million", with the mission of constructing and democratising "artificial general intelligence" .

While the company has not revealed the names of the research team, it claims to have already formed a group of researchers "internationally recognised" for their expertise in the field, and who have already worked "for around ten years within of the largest international players on the market".

Iliad will also organise its first European conference on AI, which aims to become "the benchmark annual event" on this subject in Europe.

The first edition is scheduled to take place on 17 November at Station F, the world's largest start-up incubator in Paris, founded by Niel in 2017.

(with AFP)