[light_hue_1]

There's nothing to celebrate here. This is another sad moment for Europeans everywhere.

> The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding.

For this to be a serious effort it would take another two zeros at the end of that number. This is 100x too small.

In 6 years, we'll have spent a pittance, to realize that we got basically nothing for it, and we're even further behind the US whose companies are spending tens of billions to develop new accelerators.

Let's take one US company at random, Groq, they've raised 10x this amount of money. That's one startup. Never mind Cerebras, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, etc. How is this effort going to compete? And they're giving the money to "38 leading partners" instead of one focused entity. It won't compete. It's just a waste.

The EU is still thinking too small. In an era where the US is no longer a reliable partner (maybe even a rival), and where Taiwan could disappear overnight, this is extremely stupid and dangerous.

I don't understand why the EU can't get serious about tech. Why does every investment need to be peanuts? Why can't we pay people well so they don't all leave to the US/Canada? Why can't we seriously invest in startups?

[ajmurmann]

Who in Europe would fund something bigger? Governments are tight on money and in many countries a aging population is overwhelming the welfare state while at the same time defense spending must go up dramatically and yesterday.

Private investors in Europe don't have the very deep pockets of US tech investors and there is much less of a culture of risk taking in investing in Europe on top of that

Edit: to be clear, I agree with your general point.

[Havoc]

Comparing cpu centric startups to AI accelerator ones on funding raised in current climate is a little silly.

[intelVISA]

Speculation is that most of these EU funding efforts aren't for producing viable competitors but industry subsidry - jobs programs with a dash of embezzling.

Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.

[triknomeister]

Not completely disagreeing with you but:

1. It is a single entity but composed of teams from 38 different partners. They have a "consortium". It has its disadvantages but it is not a completely independent funding.

2. The "consortium" may have asked for much more (between 5x to 20x more) and was probably denied.

As to your question of why we cannot seriously invest in startups?

- Because we do not have a single funding agency across whole of Europe. Each country has its own funding problems and Germany has its debt brake. So, the funding is not unified. Each country wants to fund 10 of its own startups instead of Europe by itself funding 10. This means 10x less money. EU Horizon projects didn't focus on industry at all. EuroHPC is a very new, 4 years into its first projects.

- There's no funding because we do not have customers! None of European tech companies will benefit from chips enough to invest in new tech. All of them are running old technologies. Car companies are to blame here because they are the biggest customers in Germany and they think of themselves as only car companies. No one in Germany is doing AI for cars for FSD for example. In general, European consumption is very backward and low-tech.

- Europe is finding it very hard to raise capital from outside Europe due to various reasons. Like Groq raised 650M from Saudi Arabia. In Europe, that is politically impossible.

[Yoric]

You make a point. However, I'm not sure how it'd be possible.

The US has been funded by an insane level of debt for the last 60+ years. Debt that might come calling quite soon, according to Donald Trump's own treasure secretary, iirc, and might even be the reason for all the current apparent international Trump-craziness (well, Trump being a narcissist certainly doesn't help).

While the EU has serious debt, if I understand correctly, that's several orders of magnitude smaller when compared to GNP, which limits the ability of the EU to invest.