The European Commission has opened a call for tenders to build up to seven "AI gigafactories" — large-scale facilities designed to train next-generation AI models on European soil — backed by roughly €30 billion in combined public and private funding. Brussels is putting up about €5 billion of that directly, EU member states are expected to contribute another €5 billion, and the remaining €20 billion is meant to come from private investors. For now, the Commission itself can only commit €1 billion immediately, with the rest tied to the next EU budget cycle.
Ten countries, including Germany, Italy, Poland, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Portugal and Spain, have expressed interest in hosting a site, and the programme allows both single-country bids and multi-country consortia. France has broken from that pattern: officials in Paris have signalled they intend to build and fund a gigafactory largely on their own rather than pooling resources with neighbouring states, betting that going solo gives the country more control over where the facility sits and who benefits from the compute it produces.
No specific site has been confirmed yet for the French bid, and construction across the wider programme is not expected to begin before early 2027, with facilities targeted to be operational by mid-2028. The broader goal behind the gigafactory programme is reducing Europe's reliance on American and Chinese AI infrastructure providers — a goal that a go-it-alone French project would still serve, even if it complicates the Commission's preference for pooled, cross-border investment.
