The Commission has launched RAISE, a pledging initiative to rally support for artificial intelligence in European research, asking member states, institutions and industry to commit resources, above all compute, to scientific AI. The initiative sits inside the bloc’s wider AI sovereignty programme, alongside gigafactory investments and the Apply AI strategy.
European science’s complaint is specific: researchers cannot access frontier scale compute, so models, talent and eventually companies migrate to the United States. A pledging model is Brussels’ way of aggregating demand without a single EU budget line, and its weakness is the same as its design, pledges are voluntary until they are contracts.
Read with this week’s technology file, the initiative is one front of a two front week for European tech policy: the UK regulator proposing strategic market status over Microsoft’s software empire, published here this morning, and the Commission trying to build the research base that might one day produce a European alternative.