ELLIS Welcomes InvestAI Initiative as an Endorsement of Its Mission
The ELLIS network welcomes the InvestAI initiative by the European Commission as a significant step toward strengthening Europe’s AI ecosystem. By prioritizing large-scale computing infrastructure, the initiative aligns with ELLIS’s mission to support cutting-edge research, open collaboration, and talent-driven innovation. ELLIS emphasizes that sustained investment in AI talent and cross-border networks is essential to ensuring Europe’s long-term competitiveness in AI.
Today at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced InvestAI, a European initiative to mobilize €200 billion for AI investments. This includes a €20 billion fund for AI gigafactories, housing 100,000 advanced AI chips to support complex model training. The initiative aims to strengthen Europe’s AI leadership by ensuring broad access to computing power and fostering open collaboration. Funded through a mix of public and private investments, InvestAI seeks to build a trustworthy AI ecosystem for industrial and critical applications.
This investment represents a long-overdue commitment by the European Commission to strengthen Europe’s position as a global leader in AI innovation. It also serves as a pivotal endorsement of ELLIS’s mission and a strong signal of support for its objectives. With its focus on establishing a pan-European network of excellence focused on advancing AI research through collaboration and innovation, grounded in European values, ELLIS aligns closely with the InvestAI initiative. Both emphasize cooperative, open AI development to build a robust, Europe-based AI ecosystem. ELLIS is committed to attracting top talent for cutting-edge research, technical innovation, and positive societal impact, demonstrated most recently through several ELLIS Members contributing to the Science Days earlier in the AI Action Week.
While InvestAI rightly highlights the need for significant computational resources to support advanced AI models, it is essential to acknowledge that the true catalysts of innovation are the human minds behind these technologies. As emphasised by Yann LeCun (Meta), Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Vicepresident), and Bernhard Schölkopf (ELLIS President) in their recent opinion piece (in Handelsblatt; El Pais; Les Echos) on the future of AI in Europe, investing in AI requires more than just infrastructure - it demands a sustained commitment to research, development, and talent acquisition. By attracting and nurturing top talent, Europe can establish a strong foundation for long-term leadership in AI, ensuring that the benefits of AI are realized for generations to come.
AI-driven innovation is ultimately created by people, not just machines, as demonstrated by models like DeepSeek, which emerged from talent-focused teams. To remain competitive on the global AI stage, Europe must cultivate an environment that prioritizes people-centered science. Without the necessary human expertise to effectively utilize and drive the advancements enabled by computational resources, these investments will not reach their full potential.
In addition to investing in talent, Europe must also focus on building strong AI hubs and networks that foster cross-border collaboration. These interconnected ecosystems are crucial for accelerating innovation and ensuring that talent is not isolated but rather engaged in a vibrant, pan-European community.
One such ecosystem, the ELLIS Institute Finland, exemplifies this vision by bringing together top AI talent within the country and connecting it to the broader ELLIS network across Europe. It was highlighted by the Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo at the AI Action Summit in his plenary speech on the opportunities of AI in society.
ELLIS, with its established pan-European network of leading AI researchers and proven track record of fostering collaboration and attracting top talent, is ideally positioned to evolve into a CERN or EMBL-like organization for AI, securing Europe's place as a global AI powerhouse. This evolution requires significant European investment to support its people-centric mission and solidify its role as the central hub for AI research and development.
The ELLIS Members’ presence at the AI Action Summit and their involvement in key AI initiatives show the collaborative strength of the network. Investing in ELLIS means investing in a model of AI research and innovation that spans across Europe, where talent is not confined by national borders but instead thrives in a collective ecosystem. By continuing to support and expand this network, Europe can ensure that it not only attracts and nurtures top talent but also creates the synergies needed to lead in AI on the global stage.
About ELLIS
ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) is a pan-European AI network of excellence founded in 2018. It builds upon machine learning as the driving force of modern AI and aims to secure lasting international leadership in AI developed in Europe. By fostering collaboration among top researchers and creating a multi-centric research laboratory, ELLIS ensures that Europe remains at the forefront of cutting-edge AI innovation. The network has grown to include 43 ELLIS Sites at world-class institutions across 16 countries, 16 specialised research programs, and a pan-European PhD/Postdoc program. Through these efforts, ELLIS shapes the future of artificial intelligence in alignment with Europe’s values of openness, collaboration, and societal impact.
