The European Commission is raising 20 billion to construct four "AI gigafactories" as part of Europe's strategy to catch up with the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence, but some industry experts question whether it makes sense to build them. The plan for the large public access data centers, unveiled by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last month, will face challenges ranging from obtaining chips to finding suitable sites and electricity. "Even if we would build such a big computing factory in Europe, and even if we would train a model on that infrastructure, once it's ready, what do we do with it?" said Bertin Martens, of economic think tank Bruegel. The hope is that new local firms such as France's Nvidia-backed Mistral startup will grow and use them to create AI models that operate in line with EU AI safety and data protection rules, which are stricter than those in the U.S. or China.

Time Machine foresees to design and implement advanced new digitisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to mine Europe's vast cultural heritage, providing fair and free access to information that will support future scientific and technological developments in Europe The Time Machine will create advanced AI technologies to make sense of vast amounts of information from complex historical data sets. This will enable the transformation of fragmented data – with content ranging from medieval manuscripts and historical objects to smartphone and satellite images – into useable knowledge for industry. In essence, a large-scale computing and digitisation infrastructure will map Europe's entire social, cultural and geographical evolution. Considering the unprecedented scale and complexity of the data, The Time Machine's AI even has the potential to create a strong competitive advantage for Europe in the global AI race. "Time Machine is likely to become one of the most advanced Artificial Intelligence systems ever built, trained on data from wider geographical and temporal horizons", explains Frederic Kaplan, Professor of Digital Humanities at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Coordinator of the Time Machine Project.