The European Commission has opened the bidding to build up to seven AI “gigafactories,” vast computing hubs meant to give the bloc the raw power to train frontier AI models without depending on the United States.
The call for tenders, launched today, is pitched as a roughly €30 billion effort to close the gap with American and Chinese AI.
The structure is a public-private split. Brussels and member states would put in about €10 billion between them, with the other €20 billion expected from private investors, on the bet that state money can crowd in the capital these projects need.
The scale is deliberately enormous. Each gigafactory would house at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips, making it roughly four times more powerful than the largest data centres running in the EU today, and together they would more than double the bloc’s AI compute.
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 “gigafactory” name is a deliberate step up. Europe already funds a network of 19 smaller “AI factories” attached to its supercomputers, but the new sites are meant to be an order of magnitude larger, built to train the kind of frontier models that today only a handful of US and Chinese labs can afford.
