Paris summit brings AI focus back to Europe, by Nick Freer

American computer scientist John McCarthy and colleagues from Dartmouth College are credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence” at a small conference in 1956.  Fast forward seventy years and AI is ubiquitous in the news.

This week, French President Emmanuel Macron announced over 100 billion Euros of investments into artificial intelligence at the AI Action Summit in Paris, bringing some of the media focus back to Europe at a time when the US and China dominate the headlines.

In tandem with the United Arab Emirates who are helping to fund the deal via Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, investments will be made into both French and Emirati AI - via the acquisition of cutting-edge chips, data centres, talent development, the establishment of “virtual data embassies”, and cloud infrastructure in both territories.

Everywhere you look, the UAE is all over AI, and no great surprise when you consider they have had an artificial intelligence minister in place since 2017.  Oh, and pockets that are deeper than an Arabian oil well.

In situ in the French capital was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who will be spearheading the world’s largest AI infrastructure project, dubbed “Stargate” and totalling around $500 billion including involvement from MGX, in the US alongside Oracle and Japan’s SoftBank.

With such big ticket projects and eye watering valuations, it can be difficult to see where the opportunities lie for Scottish tech.  However, we only have to look a few hundred miles south to see that UK startups can have a seat at AI’s top table.

Fluidstack, a startup founded at the University of Oxford in 2017, is to build the 1 gigawatt AI supercomputer in France that is integral to Macron’s AI plan, a decarbonised energy-powered data centre that will leverage the nation’s predominantly nuclear energy.

As we know, innovation and the universities go hand in hand, and in 2024 the UK ranked fourth globally for research and innovation around AI, with high-performing universities and innovative businesses attracting significant investment, with the UK also home to approximately a third of Europe’s AI startups.

The latest figures from analytics firm Dealroom reveal the appetite of venture capitalists for artificial intelligence, with AI startups raising $110 billion worldwide in 2024, up by over 60 per cent against 2023, while the year-on-year overall funding for technology startups and scale-ups actually went down by over 10 per cent.

At the Edinburgh Futures Institute last week, Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s tech startup support initiative run by CodeBase, reported on its second year of operation, recording an increasing number of “AI-first” Techscaler companies, with many others pivoting to “AI-focused strategies”.

There is growing sentiment that we can harness the value of AI in new business creation here, in large part by connecting cutting-edge research with our startup ecosystem.

And if we can align with global platforms and tap into international investors whose hunger for AI talent is unlikely to abate, perhaps Scotland can genuinely position itself towards the fore of AI-driven innovation.