Iliad Pledges Millions to Boost French AI Sector, Building an 'Excellence Lab' and Acquiring Top-Tier Supercomputer
Summary:
Iliad, a French telecommunications group, has announced plans to invest millions into boosting the French artificial intelligence (AI) sector, including a $106m USD investment into an AI research 'excellence lab' in Paris. The firm has also acquired a high-end, cloud-native AI supercomputer. In tandem, Iliad's subsidiary, Scaleway, intends to offer clients access to a variety of cloud-native AI tools - a move aimed at advancing European AI innovations to compete globally.
Iliad, a leading French telecommunications organization, revealed on September 26 its strategy to pour millions into the development of France's domestic artificial intelligence (AI) sector. The company has already allocated $106 million USD (€100 million) for the establishment of an "excellence lab" in Paris, focusing on AI innovation. The lab, which already hosts a group of prestigious scientists, will be supervised by the Iliad Chairman, Xavier Niel. Niel believes in the need to construct a complete ecosystem in France, with the research lab being a major contributor. The primary aim of the lab is to develop general AI accessible to all and to make AI investigations open to public scrutiny. Iliad has also procured what it classified as Europe's “most formidable cloud-native AI supercomputer to date”. An NVIDIA DGX H100 systems-equipped NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD has been set up near Paris, in the company's Datacenter 5. Niel iterated their commitment to massive investment in the AI domain, citing the need for supercomputers to leverage the requisite computational power. This SuperPOD, according to Iliad, is instrumental in swiftly training extensive language models (LLMs). Iliad's subsidiary, Scaleway, is also scheming to provision its clientele with a comprehensive selection of cloud-native AI tools, enabling model building of various sizes. Scaleway's CEO, Damien Lucas, asserted that these tools would give European ventures a considerable boost in their AI developments, empowering them to compete globally. This revelation is hot on the heels of European Union President Ursula von der Leyen’s September 13 announcement about an impending initiative to expedite AI start-ups' access to European supercomputers.
Published At
9/26/2023 1:30:09 PM
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