The European Commission has launched a call for tenders to publicly finance up to seven AI gigafactories in Europe, as Brussels races to build sovereign infrastructure to train advanced AI models and catch up with global tech competitors.
AI gigafactories are large-scale computing facilities equipped with state-of-the-art, highly specialised chips designed to train the next generation of AI technologies – notably the most advanced large language models, which require crunching trillions of data points.
The move forms part of a broader tech sovereignty push to cut the EU's dependence on foreign suppliers of cloud services and chips.
The global race to build ever more powerful models, with their promise of breakthroughs in both economic and military terms, has triggered a parallel scramble to build the infrastructure underpinning them. Massive data centre projects are already well underway in the US and China.
In response, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a plan to build AI gigafactories in Europe at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, with the ambition of replicating the success of the CERN laboratory in Geneva.
