When reading newspapers and magazines worldwide in these first days of 2025, it seems Artificial Intelligence is the most discussed topic. A couple of examples regard the new Samsung S25 mobile phone, launched on 21 Jan 2025, proudly showing the implementation of AI-based functions and the recently unveiled Chinese DeepSeek, already identified as the latest market disruptor. The latter is generating a lot of discussions: on the one hand, its development cost less money than ChatGPT’s while it is said to carry out deeper searches, faster and more efficiently. On the other hand, it has been blamed to make unauthorised use of ChatGPT resources for its “learning process” and it also raised suspects about its privacy status such as the location of its IT servers, the way data harvested are processed, the duration of data storage, etc..
With regard to its unclear privacy rules today, 30th Jan 2025, Italy has banned its download from both Apple and Google apps stores (read here news in Italian).
Strangely enough, nobody discussed the amount of energy used by its data centres, which was a concern until recent times when talking about AI servers.
I remember the campaign Google promoted some time ago saying they were updating their servers farms, using liquid cooling systems that proved to be more effective and using less energy that, in any case, would have been produced from Renewable Energy Sources.
In case of DeepSeek, the sustainability problem hasn’t been raised, yet. Probably, its market impact is what worries the most now.
I also think of another big issue: where is Europe in this race? According to the European Parliamentary Research Service, between the 2018 and Q3 2023, the EU invested nearly EUR 32.5bn in AI companies. In the same period, the U.S. invested about three times more in US AI companies.
A couple of weeks ago, the UK prime minister set out a plan to make the UK world leader in AI and announced investments of about £14bn for a twenty-fold increase of Britain’s computing power.
We know the great potential involved by introducing AI features in several fields that, I am sure, will generate a number of new jobs in the future. Since Europe (as a continent) is currently late in the race, I hope it will look at AI with more attention to other aspects which include, but are not limited to, environment, energy-efficient data centres, privacy, while designing effective training course of individuals and duly preparing companies (in particular SMEs) to face this challenge that could make the 21st century be remembered for this great leap forward.
For those who would like to read more about this engaging topic, these below are reliable sources of information:
- AI investment: EU and global indicators (PDF) by the European Parliamentary Research Service
- 2024 AI Index Report by the Stanford University
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting and EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
Article written by human beings without any use of AI. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2025
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