The French Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, and his German counterpart, Peter Altmaier, announced on Wednesday 28 August that they would apply the Battery Alliance model to artificial intelligence in order to create a new European sector capable of competing on an international level.
In the margins of the summer session of Medef, the French employers' organisation, the French minister announced his intention to “reform the European dogma”, in particular on free competition “which must not prevent the emergence of European champions”, referring to the refusal by the European Commission to allow Siemens to acquire Alstom at the beginning of the year (see EUROPE 12188/1).
In this context, the two ministers want to work on the reform of European public aid law. “We recognise that, in order to face the challenges of new technologies [...] we need public support, we need to bring public money to private investments that, otherwise, will not be enough”.
“ We made this choice with Germany on electric batteries; thanks to this choice, we will have an independent electric battery industry. And I have just finished a conversation with Peter Altmaier: we are going to do exactly the same thing on artificial intelligence ”, said the French minister. France and Germany should therefore make proposals “in the coming months”, he said, to invest massively in data storage in the field of artificial intelligence.
The two countries want to catch up with China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence and intend to use the European Union's single market to create a “new Airbus of AI”, according to Minister Altmaier.
Already the Member States of the European Union, with the blessing of the European Commission, are currently sounding the alarm bell to bring about the emergence of a vast European battery sector to enable the development of European electromobility (see EUROPE 12233/23). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)