The European Union wants to reduce its dependence on non-EU datacentres in support of its plan to become an artificial intelligence superpower
The European Union (EU) wants to more than triple the size of its datacentre capacity in the next five-to-seven years to reduce its dependence on artificial intelligence (AI) compute capacity located in other regions of the world, it has emerged. This intention is detailed in a copy of the EU's draft 12-page AI continent plan, which sets out the actions it claims must be taken to both capitalise on the European Union's existing strengths in the field of AI and to reduce its reliance on overseas clouds. "The EU currently lags behind the US and China in terms of available datacentre capacity, relying heavily on infrastructure installed in other regions of the world, which EU users access via the cloud [and] this dependence on non-EU infrastructure is a concern for European industry but also for public authorities," said the draft document, seen by Computer Weekly. "To adequately serve the AI and general computing needs of businesses and public administrations across the entire EU, and to ensure competitiveness and sovereignty, it is essential for the EU to increase its current cloud and datacentre capacity in a geographically balanced manner." To ensure the EU has access to enough sovereign cloud capacity to support its AI ambitions, it is consulting on the creation of legislation – dubbed the Cloud and AI Development Act – to accelerate the pace of new datacentre developments. "Today, the average time to obtain a permit and the related environmental authorisations for building a datacentre in Europe often lies upwards of 48 months … [and] the datacentre industry struggles to identify suitable sites, and to obtain sufficient energy to power their facilities. The Cloud and AI Development Act will address these obstacles," said the document. It will do this by ensuring datacentre projects that meet…