The EU Supercomputing Alliance announced the winners of its AI startup competition yesterday, with four companies splitting a €1 billion prize fund and valuable uptime on some of the world’s most powerful computer systems to train models.
Training and running AI requires huge amounts of computational resources. For example, Microsoft built Eagle, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, for new investments as part of a deal with OpenAI. Elon Musk plans to build a massive Nvidia-based supercomputer for his new artificial intelligence startup, xAI.
It’s no secret that the EU is a big pusher of what it calls “digital sovereignty.” Fearing that it will once again be left behind in the global tech race, the EU has poured billions of euros into a supercomputer coalition known as EuroHPC. Moreover, the EU has pledged to make EU supercomputers available to European AI startups.
Of course, these startups can’t just show up and ask for node time. To that end, EuroHPC launched a competition last year called the Large AI Grand Challenge. On Wednesday, it announced four winners who will share a 1 billion euro prize.
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Over the next 12 months, the company will also perform 8 million hours of calculations on the LUMI and LEONARDO supercomputers (ranked among the world’s fastest HPC systems and located in Kajaani, Finland and Bologna, Italy, respectively). Access to such powerful systems will reduce training times for large AI models from years to weeks.
The four winners, selected from 94 proposals submitted, are:
- Lingua Custodia, France. Fintech startup providing AI and natural language processing for the financial sector.
- Unbabel, Portugal. A language technology company that combines human and machine translation to provide multilingual support for all 24 official EU languages.
- Tilde, Estonia, also focusing on machine translation and AI-powered chatbots for Baltic-Slavic languages.
- Textgain, Belgium. AI startup helping businesses and organizations gain insights from unstructured data through predictive text analytics, with a particular focus on analyzing hate speech.
EuroHPC also decided to award an additional 800,000 hours on the Mare Nostrum supercomputer in Barcelona to the fifth entry, a quantum computing and AI startup. Multiverse Computing From Spain.
After 12 months, the winning startups are expected to release them under an open source and non-commercial license or publish their findings.
