“This is more than a wake-up call; this is a slap in our face,” said Christian Miele, general partner at venture capital firm Headline, which invests in French AI firm Mistral.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has talked big about the EU becoming a leader in AI innovation as part of a larger bid to help the region catch up with the U.S. and China. French President Emmanuel Macron is aiming for a similar pitch at a global AI summit he’ll host next month.

The size of the U.S. plan blows the EU pitch out of the water, and reveals the U.S. focus on keeping up with China. Europe – which has already lost out on social media, cloud and chips – looks already set to fall behind on AI.

In just a week, the U.S. has taken a radically more aggressive stance on AI, restricting the export of its AI chips to the rest of the world, ditching an AI regulation push and now rolling out an investment program that one investor likened to the Manhattan Project — the U.S. scheme to produce a nuclear weapon in the 1940s. 

Magnitude

The EU does have plans to foster the rollout of the hardware needed to train artificial intelligence models, such as European rivals to OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. 

In December, the Commission selected seven sites across the bloc that would receive funding to build AI-optimized supercomputers, open for startups and researchers to train their AI models.