Changes from plenary report to adopted text

(a) be granted to users residing, established or located in a Member State or in a third country associated to the Digital Europe Programme, to Horizon Europe or to the Connecting Europe Facility;

(b) be free of charge for the users from entities governed by public law. It shall also be free of charge for industrial users for applications related to research and innovation activities funded by Horizon Europe, the Digital Europe Programme, or the Connecting Europe Facility as well as those awarded a Seal of Excellence under Horizon Europe or the Digital Europe Programme and for private innovation activities of SMEs and scale-ups;

(c) include reserved compute resources specifically for EU-funded research projects and small companies and entities operating under the open science principle, ensuring guaranteed availability and scheduling priority.

(ca) grant priority access, and where feasible targetted support measures for SMEs, start-ups, micro-enterprises and research organisations, including those in non-for-profit or pre-competitive research, developing applications with high societal or industrial impact on the Union.

11. The Governing Board shall monitor the share of the Union’s access time for the different types of users, defined in point (a) of paragraph 10. In case where there is a significant imbalance in shares of access time between the different types of users versus demand, it shall take appropriate corrective action to address this imbalance.

12. Contributions from the Union or the Participating States shall be subject to conditions ensuring the protection of the Union's strategic interests. The specific conditions referred to in this paragraph shall be laid down in a dedicated AI Gigafactory Hosting Agreement between the Joint Undertaking and the AI Gigafactory consortium. The AI Gigafactory Hosting Agreement shall be governed by Union law, supplemented, for any matter not covered by this Regulation or by other Union legal acts, by the law of the Member State where the hosting entity is established. The AI Gigafactory Hosting Agreement shall:

(a) set out in detail the ownership and governance structure of the AI Gigafactory;

(b) include provisions ensuring an effective scrutiny and control of the AI Gigafactory by the Union for safeguarding the Union’s strategic assets, interests, autonomy or security;

(c) specify the financial contributions of the Union, of the Participating States and the public and/or private partners of the AI Gigafactory Consortium including the guaranteed access time to the AI Gigafactory referred to in paragraph 8, as appropriate, and its duration;

(d) specify, if appropriate, any other Union’s interests resulting from any Union investments regulated by specific investment agreements between the AI Gigafactory consortium and InvestEU;

(e) set out the eligibility conditions for the non-Union users of an AI Gigafactory; these shall comply with the same conditions as the eligibility conditions specified in paragraph 2;

(f) set out the detailed conditions for access for the Union users and the accounting modalities of the access times to the AI Gigafactory services;

(g) the quality of service offered to the Joint Undertaking users when operating the AI Gigafactory, as set out in the service level agreement included in the AI Gigafactory Hosting Agreement;

(h) set out the modalities of acquisition, operation and use of the AI Gigafactory data and compute infrastructure, including the user requirements from the public sector, where appropriate; where the AI Gigafactory Consortium includes one or more technology infrastructure suppliers, the AI Gigafactory Hosting Agreement shall include the provision of enhanced conflict-of-interest safeguards concerning these suppliers;

(i) the conditions for the transfer of ownership referred to in paragraph 7, where appropriate;

(j) detail the extension of ownership or of the pre-agreed guaranteed purchased access time, as appropriate, and the phasing out conditions for the AI Gigafactory, where appropriate;

(k) the liability conditions for operating the AI Gigafactory, where appropriate;

(l) the obligation of the AI Gigafactory hosting entity to submit by 31 January of each year to the Governing Board an audit report and data on the use of the Union access time in the previous financial year;

(m) contain an arbitration clause, within the meaning of Article 272 TFEU, granting jurisdiction over all matters covered by the hosting agreement to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

13. The AI Gigafactory shall include a public governance body composed of representatives from the Commission and the Participating States providing public funding to the specific AI Gigafactory. Without prejudice to the AI Gigafactory consortium’s management and operational autonomy, and to ensure alignment with the public interest objectives underpinning the public funding, the following elements shall require explicit prior approval from the designated public governance body:

(a) Any proposed access agreements with entities from third countries that may raise concerns regarding the Union’s strategic assets, interests, autonomy or security;

(b) Substantial changes to the legal and financial structure or control impacting the Union’s interests or those of the Participating States, such as a change in the ultimate ownership or control of the AI Gigafactory, any relocation of critical assets outside the Union or major financial restructuring decisions;

(c) Significant change in the strategic purpose of the AI Gigafactories.

14. Following a call for expression of interest, the AI Gigafactory Consortium shall be selected by the Governing Board of the Joint Undertaking through a fair and transparent process, with the support of a panel of independent experts and of an accredited financial institution appointed by the Governing Board for the evaluation, based, inter alia, on the following criteria:

(a) Technical evaluation:

(1) Objectives and technical quality of the proposal

(2) Quality of the workplan

(3) Quality and security of the physical, IT and networking infrastructure

(4) Sustainability, energy and water efficiency

(5) Consortium experience and know-how in setting up similar large-scale facilities.

(b) Potential Impact:

(1) Quality of service, including security, trustworthiness and user orientation

(2) Impact on the European AI ecosystem, including geographical balance and expansion of Union-wide access

(3) EU added value which increases the Union’s tech sovereignty and positively impacts the Union’s strategic autonomy

(c) Financial Feasibility:

(1) Investment commitments of the Participating States and of the AI Gigafactory Consortium

(1a) Detailed, plausible and commitment-based estimates

(2) Quality and financial viability of the proposed business model (including a due diligence to be carried out by the appointed accredited financial institution).

(d) Labour Market Impact:

(1) Attracting, developing and retaining high-skill, diverse AI talent

(2) Creating high-quality jobs

14a. The Joint Undertaking shall report annually with regard to:

(a) the capacity utilization of the compute infrastructure for the purposes of developing European large AI models;

(b) the number of new original large artificial intelligence models developed;

(c) `sustainability, energy and water efficiency, and access to renewable energy.

15. Where the Consortium does not include one or more technology infrastructure suppliers, the suppliers of the AI Gigafactory shall be selected by the AI Gigafactory Consortium based on fair and transparent tender specifications that shall take into account general system specifications, and in particular the user requirements from the public sector, provided by the Union in the call for expression of interest and further specified in the AI Gigafactory Hosting Agreement. The selection shall be based on fair, open and transparent criteria, and shall also ensure EU added value and address the security and resilience of the supply chain. The selected tenderers shall comply with the eligibility conditions specified in paragraph 2.

16. The Joint Undertaking may establish framework contracts for the provision of essential and high-demand components, such as advanced AI processors. The AI Gigafactory Consortia may use the framework contracts referred to in this paragraph for their procurement.

17. The Joint Undertaking shall promote balanced participation of Member States in the establishment of and access to AI Gigafactories and Quantum Competence Centres.

(26) Article 16 is amended as follows:

(27) Paragraph 1 is replaced by the following:

Without prejudice to Article 17(9), the use of EuroHPC supercomputers shall be open to users from the public and private sectors applications. Except for the industrial-grade EuroHPC supercomputers, their use shall be primarily for research and innovation purposes falling under public funding programmes, for public sector applications and for private innovation activities of SMEs, where appropriate.

The Annex is amended as follows:

(28) Article 3 of the Annex is amended as follows:

(29) Paragraph 2 is amended:

Any application of a Member State or a third country associated to Horizon Europe or the Digital Europe Programme for membership of the Joint Undertaking shall be addressed to the Governing Board. The candidate countries shall provide a written acceptance of these Statutes, and of any other provisions governing the functioning of the Joint Undertaking. The candidates shall also provide their motivation for requesting membership to the Joint Undertaking and indicate how their national supercomputing or quantum technology strategy is aligned with the Joint Undertaking's objectives. The Governing Board shall assess the application, taking into account the relevance and the potential added value of the candidate as regards the achievement of the mission and objectives of the Joint Undertaking and may decide to ask for clarifications regarding the candidature before endorsing the application.

(30) Article 4 of the Annex is amended as follows:

(31) the following point (d) is added in paragraph 1:

(d) the Quantum Strategy Advisory Group.

(32) Article 5 of the Annex is amended as follows:

(33) the following paragraph 3 is added: