The AI Gigafactories call is now open.

[willemsst@mastodon.social]

@HennaVirkkunen please don’t.

[davey_cakes@mastodon.ie]

@HennaVirkkunen Euro Torment Nexus

[sortingbuttons@mastodon.social]

@HennaVirkkunen And then when this industry collapses you can be the specialest person who was like, "I didn't waste your tax money on this, I improved the climate for us all instead". Omg you could be so cool and sexy if you did that, can you imagine?

[roskakori@graz.social]

@HennaVirkkunen

[ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog]

@engineer @danielquinn @HennaVirkkunen Historically, that has not prevented the projects with signed contracts from going forward. A lot of (EU-funded) Blockchain/Web3/NFT research projects were carried out long after their valuations had collapsed.

[humanhorseshoes@mastodon.world]

@ansuz @engineer @danielquinn @HennaVirkkunen the EU couldn’t find its own ass with both hands and a map

[zabow@mastodon.bida.im]

@HennaVirkkunen AI gigafactories, uhm yeah. You really don't understand what you're talking about. And I thought you did.

@oblomov

[pelle@veganism.social]

@HennaVirkkunen
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

[moskitokoenig@dizl.de]

»This is a milestone for Europe in becoming an AI Continent.«
These days, I just find myself shaking my head more and more every day.

@HennaVirkkunen

[nickeast_indiewriter@mastodon.art]

@HennaVirkkunen Even if we disregard all the ethical issues of LLMs like theft, scams, and so much more.
Even then when the AI bubble collapses that'll be €30 billion down the drain.
This will go down as one of the worst decision anyone in the EU has ever made....

[j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz]

@HennaVirkkunen If only I could vote you out of your position I would. And the world would be a slightly better place.

[adora@critter.cafe]

@HennaVirkkunen Well fuck you.

[kbal@fedia.io]

Attempting to rebrand your AI datacentres as “gigafactories” is an impressively bad way to announce this mistake. They are not factories. They do not manufacture anything. They run software, and they soak up surplus investment capital and other resources which are for some reason in need of burning.

People of the recent past and the recent future alike would have a hard time understanding how anyone could think that “Europe becoming an AI Continent” is a phrase that could be taken seriously by anyone.

[cohentheblue@ohai.social]

@HennaVirkkunen Why. Is there actually a structured plan on how to measure for outcomes and test before building all that out?

Or is it just "they have money, let's sell all we can of our countries because obviously money is gonna feed us and make our society better!" /s

[marija_@mastodon.social]

@HennaVirkkunen Sovereignty without accountability becomes GovOS theater.

[stonebear2@hachyderm.io]

@ansuz @engineer @danielquinn @HennaVirkkunen

I have an idea here: We *do* need to get off the Amerikaanse bigtech cloud. Let's build datacentres, but let's design them so they're (a) _efficient_ and (b) _flexible_, so when we finally get 'round to actually building them (and may it be because AI collapses tomorrow, with all its inefficiency and theft and planet-harming), we can build for ordinary cloud load, sustainable power, and a general win-win for everybody, not just billionaires pushing AI.

[hazzcon@mastodon.sdf.org]

@HennaVirkkunen that is some strong bullshit right there. AI continent my ass.

[vanecx@mastodon.pirateparty.be]

@HennaVirkkunen What a waste of resources
Please invest that money in digital commons instead, we need more democratic spaces and practices

[research_ftw@sciences.social]

@HennaVirkkunen Wow, you mean the AI bubble that's about to pop and cost trillions on wasted pointless data centres?
You are a bit behind the times!

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@HennaVirkkunen

So, just to confirm: you observed the US become dominated by billionaires and exploitative companies who are throwing trillions or dollars at technology that provides marginal (at best) benefits to society and entrenches their power, and your reaction was 'the EU should do that too!'?

For comparison, the amount that you're burning on this is more than twice as much as you'd need for the EU to build a competitive range of memory-safe sovereign CPUs from microcontroller up to server class devices and port most open-source software to run on them. This would reduce the attack surface for all EU infrastructure significantly and provide strong sovereignty guarantees.

Can you share how you did a cost-benefit calculation and decided that chasing a big-tech fad was the best return on investment for the bloc?