Cloud and AI Development Act

Key points

The EESC:

• welcomes the objective of the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) to strengthen Europe’s cloud and AI ecosystem and reduce the EU’s dependence on non-European cloud and AI providers;
• calls for the proposal’s financing to be secured rather than assumed; recommends treating cloud and AI infrastructure as a protected priority in the next multiannual financial framework, with resources matching its capacity objectives; calls on the Commission to publish a consolidated overview of available EU financing before the deadline for the adoption of national strategies under Article 7; and proposes that the Commission and the European Investment Bank mobilise European institutional and private capital toward data centre and cloud infrastructure as an investment class;
• calls on Member States to meaningfully consult social partners, civil society and consumer organisations when developing or substantially revising national cloud and AI strategies under Article 7;
• calls for the designation of data centre acceleration zones under Article 10 to be made conditional on a social and environmental impact assessment covering health, employment, energy and water demand;
• recommends introducing a strict obligation on network operators to indicate available connection capacity within six months of request; considers that faster connections are no substitute for adequate power generation, and calls on the Commission to assess whether EU electricity generation can keep pace with the target of tripling data centres’ capacity;
• recommends that the ‘Union added value’ award criterion under Article 32 be given significant weight in procurement;
• calls for the indicative 25 % SME procurement objective under Article 33 to become a shared requirement;
• calls for the cloud and AI skills curriculum to be co-designed with social partners;
• draws attention to a risk accompanying the acceleration that the proposal is designed to produce: the gradual erosion of the human and institutional capability to operate, oversee and, where necessary, work without the systems being deployed.