A Scaleway-led AION consortium, with backing from Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and Mistral-adjacent partners, is positioning France as a single-country bidder against multi-state proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
A consortium of French companies led by Iliad’s cloud subsidiary Scaleway has bid roughly $10bn to build one of the European Union’s planned AI gigafactories on French soil, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The AION consortium proposes a 200-megawatt facility centred on next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to more than 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s, the largest single-country bid disclosed since the European Commission opened its gigafactory selection process.
The AION partner list, reads as a near-complete roll-call of the French AI stack. The named backers include GPU and chip-design specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, model-distribution platform Hugging Face, IT-services group Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Atos’s compute subsidiary Eviden Bull, and developer-tooling company ZML.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now! The consortium also draws operational support from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the existing AI Factory France EuroHPC project, with hosting through Opcore, Iliad’s data-centre joint venture.
