French consortium bids $10bn for EU AI gigafactory as Europe races to close gap with US and China

French companies bid $10bn for one of the EU's five planned AI gigafactory sites

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 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. The EU programme the bid sits inside is the InvestAI Facility, a €20bn envelope announced earlier this year to underwrite up to five gigafactories across the bloc. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest in the initial sounding round, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland and Portugal among the member states co-financing the programme. Telefonica is preparing the final Spanish bid; the formal call window was deferred from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to give consortia time to assemble multi-billion-euro capital structures. On the disclosed numbers, AION's $10bn capital commitment matches Iliad chair Xavier Niel's longstanding framing that France needs to outspend, not match, on AI infrastructure if it intends to keep pace with the US and Chinese build-outs. Iliad has invested €20bn in European infrastructure over the past decade, the Scaleway announcement notes; the AION figure puts roughly half that commitment into a single facility. The 288,000-H100-equivalent target is positioned as the largest single GPU cluster outside the US hyperscalers and Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate footprint. AION is not the only French-flagged AI infrastructure project the bid is competing with for capital. The MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW Paris-area campus, announced in 2025, is the parallel programme; Mistral is separately raising debt and equity for its own Sweden and Paris data-centre footprint. AION's stated differentiator is the open-source-and-public-private framing: GENCI and Inria participation positions the facility as part of the European public-research compute infrastructure, in contrast to the more commercially-driven MGX-Mistral programme. The strategic context the announcement leans into is the ongoing pressure on European AI sovereignty. GPU-as-a-service offerings from US providers have continued to dominate European frontier-AI procurement; OpenAI's pause on its UK Stargate site over energy costs and regulatory uncertainty has produced a window in which a French-only proposition can credibly claim both available power capacity (France's low-carbon grid) and a sovereign-software stack (SiPearl and Eviden hardware, Hugging Face and Kyutai software). AION's pitch is, on Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas's framing, that 'Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future.' The Bloomberg report did not name the specific French site under consideration, the capital-stack breakdown between Iliad equity, EU grants, member-state co-financing and private debt, the construction timeline, or the formal procurement-decision date the Commission is now working to. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the body running the selection process, has not yet publicly named the bidder pool or set a final decision date. Telefonica's Spanish bid and German and Dutch consortia are positioned as the most credible competing proposals. The next visible proof point will be the EuroHPC JU's shortlist announcement, expected before the end of the year on the formal-call cadence published earlier this year. AION's position alongside the wider Google-Blackstone $25bn TPU-cloud joint venture and the comparable US infrastructure announcements will become a public-market proxy for whether Europe's gigafactory programme is ultimately operating at the same order of magnitude as the US private-sector build-out.

French consortium to bid for EU's AI datacentre fund

A French consortium named AION plans to build a massive data centre costing ten billion euros. This initiative aims to enhance Europe's artificial intelligence capabilities. The project seeks funding from the European Union's new twenty billion euro fund. Iliad is ready to invest four billion euros. The data centre will significantly increase France's computing power. The AION consortium, which groups some of France's biggest tech and infrastructure companies, will seek EU funding for an expected €10 billion ($11.60 billion) data centre it plans to build in France. To try to close the gap between Europe and the ⁠United States ⁠and China, which have invested heavily in high-capacity data centres, the European Union's executive in December launched a €20 billion fund to boost investment in AI infrastructure. The AION consortium, formed last year to respond to EU efforts to become more internationally competitive on AI, comprises tech companies Artefact, Bull and ⁠Capgemini, telecoms Orange and Iliad including its data centre arm Scaleway, private equity firm Ardian, and French utility ⁠EDF. Ardian's head of infrastructure investment Benoit Guillochet said the French project alone could cost the equivalent of half of the EU's new fund. He said he expected funding from a combination of private investors, including Ardian, and bank lending, as well as EU fund money. Iliad said it was ready to deploy €4 billion, notably through its datacentre arm Scaleway. Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas said the ultimate aim was for the data centre to have a gigawatt of capacity, ⁠effectively doubling France's computing capacity, and that the initial phase would probably be around 100 megawatts. EDF said last year that it was opening calls for tenders for several of its old industrial sites with direct grid connections so data centre operators can speed up the time needed to get linked up to power supplies.

French consortium seeks funding for massive AI data center

The French consortium AION plans to apply for European funding for an artificial intelligence data center project in France, with costs potentially reaching EUR10bn. The initiative falls under the EUR20bn European fund launched last December to support strategic AI infrastructure as Europe seeks to close the gap with the United States and China. According to its backers, the French project alone could account for nearly half of the European fund. Established last year to bolster European technological sovereignty, the AION consortium brings together several major French groups, including Artefact, Bull, Capgemini, Orange, Iliad via its subsidiary Scaleway, Ardian, and EDF. The financing would rely on a combination of private equity, bank loans, and European funds. Iliad has indicated its readiness to invest up to €4bn in the project, primarily through Scaleway's data center operations. The consortium's long-term aim is to develop one gigawatt of power capacity, effectively doubling France's current computing capacity. However, an initial phase could be limited to approximately 100 megawatts. EDF had already announced tenders last year for several former industrial sites with direct grid connections to accelerate the deployment of future data centers.