The European Commission on Thursday announced a call for tenders designed to generate over €30 billion ($34 billion) in state and private funding for the construction of seven so-called AI gigafactories to boost the European Union's computing independence.
Of the funds, €10 billion will come from the EU and member states while private investors put up the remaining €20 billion.
The funds are to be collected and distributed by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which was launched in 2020 to develop "a world class supercomputing ecosystem by pooling the resources of the European Union, European countries and private partners."
Consortia and special purpose vehicles (SPVs) made up of technology and cloud service providers, public entities and investors are all eligible to apply for funding.
Chipmakers AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm have all signed letters of intent to provide chips to groups involved in the projects, according to the Commission.
