France

AI Factory France will serve as the central coordinator for the following categories of services: 

• Core service: delivering the support to all the other services, including ecosystem enabling and strengthening with communication and dissemination activities like meet-ups, hackathons, conferences organised by leading French AI think tanks. AI Factory France will also manage and make available a vast pool of AI-skilled account managers, community builders and experts serving the needs of the AI community.  It will develop a set of matchmaking and animation services and will be responsible of identifying AI-based opportunities in academia, startups, SMEs, large groups or public services. This team will also guide users, depending on their level of maturity, to the proper services performed by the AI Factory. This central core part of the AI Factory will also be in charge of the animation of the AI ecosystem federated by the AI Factory in terms of ecosystem services, support services and management of the project. 
• Compute: access to public and private French and EU (EuroHPC) HPC infrastructure and services, providing also thanks to the experience gathered from the CLUSSTER project (sovereign unified Cloud for AI) a sovereign continuum between public and some French private offers. Of course, Infrastructure services will also ensure bridges with non-EU Cloud providers as well. Such Compute Services will be completed by more upstream services of technological watch for jointly between HPC infrastructures and interested users assessing (and co designing) new hardware (accelerators, memories, networks, storage) or software (alternatives to Transformers, pruning of models, optimized inference engines...) possibly based on European technologies.  These Compute Services will encompass access to hybrid HPC/Quantum Computing facilities of GENCI and EuroHPC hosted by TGCC, including access to emulators of various technologies and access to two QPU from Pasqal (neutral atoms) and Quandela (photonics) where users could evaluate the potential of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) algorithms.  
• Talent & Innovation: strengthening talent management, training (education, permanent training and upskilling) and Innovation services including connecting start-ups with French incubators and leading VC as well as providing legal advice and support on Intellectual Property. 

• Data and MLOps: exposing and giving access to European public and private data spaces including sensitive data (in health for example), data stewardship services (including data curation), repository of models and datasets as well as the promotion of European open source foundation models and SLMs, benchmark and evaluation of models (leading to regular reports and maintaining a French or European leaderboard of models with HuggingFace) and all the aspects related to trustworthy AI (in terms of compliance with the European AI Act, explainable AI and secure AI fostering the use of AI in some industries) in relation with the European AI Office being setup.  
• As AI Factory France will be linked with all the others AI Factories across Europe, a strong collaboration program is already planned with AI Factories in Spain, Italy, Finland and Greece including mobility and networking actions as well as a special relation with the JAIF German proposal led by FZJ (using Jupiter) and the AI Factory France (led by GENCI using Alice Recoque) in order to federate the two EuroHPC’ Exascale supercomputers for new services offering an unprecedented compute capacity for federated learning or specific application vertical in material science. Collaborations will also include a strong link with ALT_EDIC and also with European initiatives including National Competence Centers, Centers of Excellence, EDIHs, TEFs, and also EOSC, Gaia-X and ESFRIs (for accessing to data spaces of instrumental data). The AI Factory France will also be linked to a global one-stop-shop at the European level that EuroHPC could setup between all different AI Factories. 

• Finally, a strong asset of the project lies in the involvement of a large, mixed academic and industrial ecosystem structured along 13 application verticals that gather researchers from academia and industry using AI or HPC and AI in Aerospace, Robotics, Health, Earth Science, Material science, Defence/Security, Energy, Digital continuum, Edtech, Mobility, Agriculture, and Legal/Finance. In addition, a cross-domain called “Humanities” activity will provide general purpose tools and models that will also benefit AI For Science and code development applications.