Considerations on COM(2024)29 - Amendment of Regulation (EU) 2021/1173 as regards an EuroHPC initiative for start-ups to boost European leadership in trustworthy Artificial Intelligence

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table>(1)Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (the ‘AI Act’) aims to improve the functioning of the internal market by laying down a uniform legal framework in particular for the development, marketing and use of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) in conformity with Union values.
(2)Since 2021, when Council Regulation (EU) 2021/1173 (3) was adopted, the field of AI has seen enormous technical progress and become a highly strategic and contested domain globally. The Union is at the forefront of efforts to support responsible research and innovation in trustworthy and ethical AI, while setting guardrails and developing effective governance.

(3)On 13 September 2023, as part of a comprehensive approach to support responsible research and innovation in AI, the Commission announced a new strategic initiative to make the Union’s high-performance computing capacity available to innovative European startups in trustworthy AI in order to train their models. That initiative complements work on setting guardrails for AI through the AI Act, establishing governance structures and supporting innovation through the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence.

(4)Given that the Union’s most powerful world-class supercomputing capacity is located in the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking’s (the ‘Joint Undertaking’) facilities, it is those facilities that should be made available in order for the Union’s initiative to become a reality. It is accordingly necessary to add a seventh objective to the existing six objectives of the Joint Undertaking, concerning the contribution made by its supercomputers to the new AI initiative of the Union.

(5)The new objective would allow the Joint Undertaking to perform activities in the domains of acquiring and operating AI-optimised supercomputers or partitions of supercomputers to enable machine learning and training of general purpose AI models. The Joint Undertaking should be allowed to create a new access mode to its computing resources for the AI startup ecosystem and the research and innovation ecosystem and to develop dedicated AI applications that are optimised to run on its supercomputers. The Joint Undertaking should also be allowed to appoint existing European High Performance Computing hosting entities as AI factories if the hosting entity can demonstrate that its supercomputer has enough computing resources for training large scale and general-purpose AI models and emerging AI applications, and provided that the hosting entity implements the full range of additional activities necessary to develop and support the AI ecosystem. Those changes would enable the Joint Undertaking to offer tailored computing power and services to nurture large-scale AI training, development and uptake in the Union, which is not feasible under the current Regulation. AI factories should interact with one another and with relevant AI initiatives of the Union, and, where applicable, AI factories can interact with relevant national AI ecosystems and national AI initiatives.

(6)In order to coordinate the date of application of the changes introduced by this amending Regulation with the date of application of the AI Act, this amending Regulation should apply without undue delay.

(7)Regulation (EU) 2021/1173 should therefore be amended accordingly,