EU opens bidding for AI gigafactories

The European Commission has launched tenders to build up to seven AI “gigafactories,” large compute hubs intended to give Europe more capacity to train frontier models without relying on US cloud infrastructure. The effort is pitched as a roughly €30 billion push to narrow the gap with American and Chinese AI infrastructure.

The plan relies on a public-private split, with Brussels and member states expected to provide about €10 billion and private investors expected to contribute the other €20 billion. Each gigafactory would contain at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips, making it roughly four times more powerful than the largest data centres currently operating in the EU. The new sites would sit above Europe’s existing network of 19 smaller “AI factories” linked to supercomputers.

Demand appears strong after an expression-of-interest round drew 76 responses, with ten countries seeking to host facilities. Funding remains the central uncertainty: only about €1 billion of the EU contribution is committed, while the rest depends on the bloc’s next long-term budget. Construction is targeted for early 2027, with the first sites due online by mid-2028.

The sovereignty case is complicated by dependence on chips from Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm, as well as European electricity costs that are two to three times those in the US or China. Supporters argue that compute capacity is only a starting point, but one Europe needs if its startups are to train models at scale.