A group of French companies has joined Iliad’s AI & data center consortium to bid for European Union funding.
Investment firm Ardian, consulting company Artefact, supercomputing stalwart Bull, Capgemini, energy company EDF, and telco Orange have teamed up with Iliad and Scaleway to join the AION consortium to launch what the group called an “ambitious” bid for France under the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative.
Announced in February 2025, the EU gigafactories project will see three to five supercomputing clusters built across the continent, each equipped with 100,000 AI chips for training the latest and most complex models.
In October, the EU said that it had received 76 grant applications to set up data centers across 16 of its Member States. Final decisions on which bids will be chosen are yet to be made.
One of those companies was Iliad-owned French cloud provider Scaleway, which at the time said it aimed to deploy several next-generation GPU clusters, equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100 GPUs and around 200MW of capacity.
