Europe must invest heavily in supercomputers, Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity

“For the first time, we will have a truly digital European programme with clear focus on opportunities for European companies and especially Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)”, said Pilar del Castillo MEP, EPP Group Spokeswoman, on the occasion of the vote on the Digital Europe Programme in the European Parliament’s Industry Committee.

By investing €9.2 billion in the next long-term EU budget for 2021-2027, the Digital Europe Programme will address increasing digital challenges by providing the digital capabilities it needs to seize all the opportunities of the Digital Transformation, be it supercomputers, Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity or digital skills.

Del Castillo highlighted the importance of the actions on Artificial Intelligence and supercomputer capacity: “Europe’s SMEs will get much better possibilities to use the future supercomputers for data analytics and exploit the future Artificial Intelligence capacities. We must not forget that currently, the supercomputers used are subject to great fees and are localised in third countries.”

While Europe has focused a great part of its digital efforts in the research and innovation fields, experience from successful public policies for high tech areas shows that, in addition, there is a need to support rapidly-developing technology fields - high performance computing, Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity and advanced digital skills.

“It must no longer be acceptable that while the EU currently consumes one third of high performance computing resources worldwide, it only provides around 5 per cent of the capacity, pushing EU scientists and engineers to turn massively to computing resources outside Europe”, Pilar del Castillo said.

The Digital Europe Programme will work hand-in-hand with the overall EU research and innovation programme Horizon Europe.