This new podcast mini-series is brought to you by Sifted and Nebius, an AI infrastructure company building full-stack cloud for the AI era. Sifted's senior reporter, Daphné Leprince-Ringuet will be exploring the AI opportunity in Europe over the next three episodes.

This week, we’ll be unpacking Europe’s position in the AI race — its ambitions, gaps and what role infrastructure plays when it comes to building the next generation of AI leaders. To do so, we are joined by Roman Chernin, cofounder and chief business officer of Nebius, Thomas Wolf, cofounder and chief science officer at Hugging Face, and Jonas Andrulis, founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha.

Drug discovery and development is an arduous, expensive process that usually results in failure. An estimated 90% of clinical drugs don’t make it to market, after an R&D process that can take as long as 15 years, and cost up to $2bn.

With AI, those numbers could be dramatically improved. Drug development could become more efficient, clinical trials could happen faster and production processes could be optimised so that every batch is just right. But to drive progress and unlock billions of dollars in value, the pharmaceutical sector needs to learn how to use AI-powered technologies at scale.

Sanofi, a global pharmaceutical and healthcare company headquartered in Paris, is one company which recognises this. It recently announced the launch of a new digital manufacturing and supply (M&S) accelerator in Lyon, where Sanofi employees will use AI to find and scale new innovations that will deliver life-changing treatments to patients faster, sometimes in partnership with startups.

Daphné Leprince-Ringuet, Sifted’s senior French tech reporter, sat down with Emmanuel Frenehard, chief digital officer, Sanofi, and Brendan O’Callaghan, executive vice president for manufacturing and supply, Sanofi, to find out more.

Every week, startup life reporter Anisah Osman Britton will be sitting down with resilient founders and expert investors to discuss operating in a downturn. From what we can learn from previous financial crises to the anatomy of mergers and acquisitions, we'll be getting top tips on how to survive during tough economic times — and what to be optimistic about. This podcast is brought to you by EQT Ventures and Sifted.