00:01Good afternoon, everybody, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to be here in VivaTech today.
00:07Walking through this exhibition, one message is very clear.
00:12Europe is innovating, Europe is ambitious.
00:15We have more than 45,000 startups in Europe, with 8,000 of them focusing to AI.
00:23They are building the future across our continent.
00:26Europe has more AI researchers per capita than anyone else.
00:31We have also world-class universities, we have outstanding engineers, we have industrial champions,
00:39and one of the richest reservoirs of industrial and scientific data in the world.
00:45So the ingredients for leadership are already here.
00:49The question is not whether Europe can innovate.
00:53It is how Europe can scale innovations into global technological leadership.
00:59This is becoming a very existential question.
01:03Today, Europe still depends heavily on non-European providers for many critical digital technologies.
01:11And that creates not only economic risks, but also strategic vulnerabilities.
01:16And also our citizens have realized that.
01:21Just today, very fresh Europe Barometer was published.
01:24And according to that, 79% of our citizens in Europe, they are ranking that digital policy is a top
01:32priority for European Union.
01:34And 85% of them, they support investments to European developed infrastructure.
01:42Everybody has seen and recognized that technology has become very central, not only to our competitiveness,
01:49but also to our security and geopolitical influence.
01:53So the next decade will not be defined by who uses AI, but also who builds it.
02:01Artificial intelligence, semiconductors, cloud computing, quantum technologies, and cyber security.
02:09They all are becoming the foundations of economic and security power.
02:15Earlier today, the G7 summit in Evian, leaders discussed these very questions with leading CEOs of the leading AI companies.
02:25Around the world, governments, they are investing now massively using industrial policy,
02:32using also export controls and investment strategy to strengthen their technological leadership.
02:40Europe must therefore strengthen our own capacity to develop, to manufacture, and deploy critical technologies
02:48while maintaining strong partnership with the trusted allies.
02:53Our technological sovereignty agenda is not about protectionism.
02:58Europe will remain open, but openness cannot be in dependency.
03:04Technological sovereignty simply means ensuring that Europe has the capacity to develop, manufacture, deploy,
03:12and also control the critical technologies underpinning our prosperity, our security, and our democracy.
03:21Mario Draghi reminded us that the Europe's competitiveness gap is increasingly a technology gap.
03:27And the good news is that Europe has changed a course.
03:31For years, Europe was known mainly about for regulating technology.
03:36But today, Europe is equally determined to build it.
03:42And artificial intelligence is at the heart of this transformation.
03:46Our AI continent action plan addresses the entire AI value chain, from talent and data, to computing power, infrastructure, adoption,
03:57and investment.
03:59Europe's challenge has never been ideas.
04:02It has been access to compute capital and customers.
04:06And this is exactly what we are now fixing.
04:10We are transforming Europe's world-class supercomputers into AI factories.
04:16Today, 19 AI factories and 13 AI factory antennas are being deployed across our Europe,
04:23providing our startups, our researchers, and SMEs with world-class computing capacity.
04:29And we are going further.
04:31Very soon, we will launch the first call for European AI gigafactories to mobilize the next generation of AI infrastructure
04:39across Europe.
04:41But we know that infrastructure alone is needed, but it's not only enough.
04:47Through our Apply AI strategy, we are also accelerating AI deployment across manufacturing, healthcare, mobility, energy, agriculture, defense,
04:57and public administration, and public administration, all our key economic sectors.
05:01At the same time, our European Frontier AI initiative will strengthen Europe's leadership in advanced AI research and next generation
05:10models.
05:12Earlier this month, I presented our European Tech Sovereignty Package.
05:18Its first pillar is the CHIPS Act 2.0.
05:21The first CHIPS Act demonstrated that Europe can strengthen our industrial base when we are acting together.
05:30And now we must go further by reinforcing the entire semiconductor value chain from design and manufacturing to packaging
05:38while stimulating demand for European-designed CHIPS and strengthening our supply chain resilience.
05:45Our second pillar is the Cloud and AI Development Act.
05:50Cloud infrastructure has become a very strategic, as strategic as energy or transport infrastructure.
05:58And our objective is to triple now Europe's data center capacity by 2030-2035 through faster permitting,
06:07greater investment, and a common European sovereignty framework for cloud services.
06:14Cloud and AI Development Act will also introduce a common European sovereignty framework with four assurance levels for cloud services,
06:24allowing public authorities to choose the level of sovereignty and security that matches the sensitivity of their data and workloads.
06:33And this will also allow public procurement to support our trusted European cloud providers and also strengthen our digital resilience.
06:44In the Commission, we are working on the talk.
06:47In April, we awarded an 180 million contract to procure sovereign cloud for the European Union institutions to four providers,
06:59which are mainly European.
07:01To evaluate the sovereignty of the providers, we created a new tool, the sovereign cloud framework that we made available
07:11for all public and private organizations
07:13who wish to strengthen their digital sovereignty and resilience.
07:17The third pillar is our open source strategy.
07:22We see that open source, it's not only a driver of innovation, it is also a strategic asset that strengthens
07:30interoperability,
07:32cybersecurity, and also European technological independence, while giving our startups and our SMEs more opportunities to scale.
07:41And finally, our roadmap of digitalization and AI in energy demonstrates how digital technologies and the green transition, they reinforce
07:50one another,
07:52because we want that this approach, what we have taken, is also sustainable.
07:58None of these ambitions will become reality without investment.
08:04Today, we see that the United States attracts more than 50% of global venture capital,
08:10and China around 40%, while Europe attracts only about 5%,
08:15which means that the many innovative European companies, they scale elsewhere.
08:21Yet, Europe has enormous financial strength, because European households,
08:26they have more than 33 trillion in accumulated savings, more than twice the European Union's annual GDP.
08:34So, we must create the right conditions now to channel more of these savings towards innovative European companies and strategic
08:42technologies.
08:44And this is what we are doing with our savings and investment union action plan.
08:50But we want to go further, and we want to go further, and this is why we are launching consultations
08:56of European tech equity capacity,
08:59capable of mobilizing hundreds of billions of Europeans for Europeans' critical technologies.
09:06And at the same time, through the digital omnibus, we are also reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
09:12So, we want to make Europe easier, simpler, faster for the businesses.
09:18Through the future EU Inc. initiative, we will also simplify scaling across our single market,
09:25while more strategic public procurement will, in the same time, help also European innovators grow faster.
09:32So, ladies and gentlemen, every generation of Europeans faces defining choices.
09:40Our generation must decide whether Europe remains primarily a consumer of technologies developed elsewhere,
09:49or if it becomes one of the places where the technologies of the future are invented, built, and deployed.
09:57I believe that the answer is very clear here.
10:00Europe has the talent, we have the researchers, we have the entrepreneurs, we have the industrial base, and we have
10:09also values.
10:11Now we are building the missing pieces, compute, chips, capital, and confidence.
10:17Our ambition is very simple.
10:20Europe should not only use the technologies of the future, Europe should create them.
10:26I invite all of you, founders, investors, researchers, and innovators, to build that future together with us.
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