EU leader in supercomputers (the second is Italian). However, it is lagging behind in AI. Draghi: “The gap with the others is clear”

Brussels – The European Union leads the way in supercomputers, and the second most powerful one is Italian. A record recalled today by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during the conference “One year after the Draghi report”. “Today we have four supercomputers in the top ten most powerful in the world,” boasted the president, “thanks to the launch of Jupiter in Germany and HPC6 in Italy.” This is a proud motto from von der Leyen in a sector, that of technological innovation and artificial intelligence, where the European Union is still lagging behind.

The Italian computer is the flagship of European production. It is located in the data centre in Ferrera Erbognone, in the province of Pavia. The computer, developed by Eni, has a computing capacity of 606 million billion operations per second, making it the sixth largest supercomputer in the world. To illustrate its power: it is capable of solving in a few seconds a calculation that would take a traditional computer a hundred years.

Eni has developed it for industrial purposes, and it is used to optimise the operation of plants, improve the accuracy of preliminary studies on CO₂ storage and promote the development of high-performance batteries. In Europe, the other computing “geniuses” are the German Jupiter, the Finnish Lumi, and Leonardo, which is also Italian and half-funded by the European Commission.

The good news ends there, however. Despite the incredible performance of European supercomputers, the Union still lags far behind in the development of artificial intelligence. Mario Draghi, speaking immediately after von der Leyen at this morning’s conference, said: “The gap is clear on the AI front. Last year, the US produced 40 great basic models, China 15 and the EU only 3. In the most strategic field, that of AI based on European intellectual property to consolidate our core industries, progress is minimal.”

Draghi’s perplexities clashed with President Ursula von der Leyen’s major announcements. The most important call had come in February, when Ursula von der Leyen had presented to the AI Action Summit in Paris a 200 billion plan. The most concrete goal, however, is to build four gigafactories for the development of AI, with preliminary funding of 20 billion.

From the private sector, however, the interest was much higher, says von der Leyen: “Our initial goal was to mobilise €20 billion of investment to develop our Gigafactories. We received proposals totalling €230 billion,” said von der Leyen. However, Draghi’s perplexity remains: “Fiscal space is limited. In the next decade (public debt ed.), it will reach 93 per cent of GDP.”