Challenge launched to pool European resources for training artificial intelligence models

03 Dec 2024 | News

Germany’s Sprind innovation agency has up to €12M for teams to overcome the continent’s fragmented AI hardware

By David Matthews

Karolina, a petascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Ostrava, Czechia. EuroHPC Joint Undertaking / European Union

Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (Sprind) has launched a challenge to create new ways for Europe to share its often fragmented data and computing power to train artificial intelligence models. 

Currently, only US and Chinese tech companies typically have the financial firepower to run enormously expensive, centralised data centres that can train the latest AI models. 

“In the EU, we don’t have that. We don’t have a player that buys 16,000 GPUs, like Meta,” said Johannes Otterbach, who is running the challenge for Sprind.

Access to graphics processing units is a critical rate limiting step, but instead of tens of thousands of GPUs, EU has lots of smaller players, which buy “100 GPUs here, a few 100 there, different generations, different…

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