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The EU launched a call for tenders to establish up to seven AI Gigafactories across Europe, as part of its latest major push to accelerate Europe’s technological sovereignty and ambition of becoming the AI Continent.
Led by industry and supported by up to €10 billion in EU and national funding, the initiative is expected to unlock at least €20 billion in private investment across the Union.
It will expand Europe’s AI computing capacity and give start-ups, scale-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises, industry, academia and public authorities access to infrastructure for training, inference and fine-tuning advanced frontier AI models.
The AI Gigafactories will combine advanced AI processors, software and cloud technology stacks, high-speed connectivity and energy-efficient data centres.
Together with Europe’s network of 19 AI Factories, they will strengthen Europe’s technological leadership, resilience and strategic autonomy.
The initiative will ensure that Europe can develop advanced AI on its own infrastructure, in line with EU rules and values.
AI technologies developed in the AI Gigafactories will follow EU standards on data protection, safety, security and ethics.
Consortia or Special Purpose Vehicles bringing together companies, public entities, investors and other partners can apply.
The AI Gigafactories may be established in a single Member State, either on one site or across several locations. They may also include cross-border developments in several Member States through distributed AI computing facilities.
Proposals will undergo a competitive evaluation to select the successful projects.
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and Member States will jointly procure compute access time from the selected AI Gigafactories. Eighteen Member States have signed a joint procurement agreement with the EuroHPC JU: Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden.
The procurement process will support up to seven AI Gigafactories across two consecutive development phases and two lots, with participating Member States matching EU funding.
Public funding acts as a powerful catalyst for the initiative, driving the deep private investment required to construct and operate these facilities.
The first lot will support up to four projects, each eligible for up to €100 million in EU funding in phase one and up to an additional €400 million per project in phase two.
Each Gigafactory selected in this lot must deploy at least as many of the most advanced AI processors as are currently installed in Europe’s most powerful AI factory.
In phase two, capacity must increase to at least three times that level. The second lot will support up to three projects, each eligible for up to €200 million of EU funding in phase one and up to an additional €800 million per project in phase two.
Each Gigafactory selected in this lot must deploy up to twice as many of the most advanced AI processors as are currently installed in Europe’s most powerful AI factory. In phase two, capacity must increase to at least four times that level.
