Statement by President von der Leyen at the G20 Summit, Session III: A Fair and a Just Future for All

Speech - President von der Leyen 

G20 Leaders Segment in South Africa

Artificial Intelligence

Dear Cyril you introduced us to philosophy of Ubuntu: “I am because we are”. It applies well to how the European Union sees the future of AI, namely as fueling a collective well-being for all, through stunning innovation and economic progress. 

Maybe this sounds idealistic. But Europe has a plan. It builds on three pillars. 

The first is investments. Big investments in large sovereign AI compute infrastructures, which we call AI Gigafactories. We want researchers, start-ups and public bodies, such as hospitals, to have access to these big computing resources at affordable conditions to train their AI models. To do this we have already established a network of powerful AI supercomputers which are ranking in the top of the world. Now we are building a public-private partnership with companies and investors to build even bigger-scale independent AI Gigafactories. The interest from the private sector is overwhelming: we have planned initially planned to build 15 such factories. We have received more than 74 proposals!

The second pillar of our plan is about the adoption of AI across the economy and society. We introduced the basic yet transformative principle of “AI First”. Whenever a company or public office faces a new challenge, the first question must be: How can AI help? 

The third pillar is our continued international engagement. Because as Europe, we won't keep our AI capabilities for ourselves. We are open to mutually beneficial partnerships. 

Let me give you an example.

Today, we discuss strengthening disaster resilience and response. With our flagship AI programme “Destination Earth”, we are able to model extreme eventswith unprecedented resolution and well ahead of the damage that will materialise. This is basically a digital twin. It is like sitting in front of a control dashboard of a spaceship called Planet Earth. We now can do things that were not imaginable few years ago. We can zoom into affected areas at resolutions of few hundred meters. We can explore how towns should be prepared for future extreme events. It is now being used daily by many partner countries across the world.

We are, for example, cooperating with the Caribbeans to offer tropical cyclone modelling. Exactly one month ago, during Hurricane Melissa, European models provided reliable early warnings 15 days in advance. This helped very much to prepare the response.

We are working through EU African partnership to rollout Destination Earth in Africa. This is a telling example of how we can bring AI to the world in its broadest sense. We are ready to step our cooperation with partners in important areas such health care, urban planning, precision agriculture. 

And cooperation is already a reality. With GenAI for Africa for example, we connect EU companies with local partners here. We are supporting to build AI Factories in Africa and connect them with to ours.

The AI Revolution will not happen a second time. Now is the moment that we should come together, and make sure that we are on the right side of history when it comes to this super powerful technology.