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

French Consortium Launches Ambitious Bid for European AI Infrastructure

The AION consortium, led by Iliad's cloud subsidiary Scaleway, has submitted a roughly $10 billion bid to secure one of the European Union's planned AI gigafactory sites on French soil, marking the largest single-country proposal disclosed since the European Commission opened its selection process 1

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. The French consortium brings together a comprehensive roster of the nation's AI and tech capabilities, including GPU specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, Hugging Face, Capgemini, Artefact, Orange, private equity firm Ardian, French utility EDF, and Atos's compute subsidiary Eviden Bull 1

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The proposed AI data center would feature a 200-megawatts facility centered on next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to more than 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s, positioning it as the largest single GPU cluster outside US hyperscalers and the Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate footprint 1

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. Iliad has indicated its readiness to deploy €4 billion into the project, notably through Scaleway's data center operations 2

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Competing for European Union Fund Under InvestAI Facility

The bid targets funding from the EU's InvestAI Facility, a €20 billion envelope announced earlier this year designed to underwrite up to five gigafactories across the bloc 1

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. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest during the initial sounding round, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and Portugal among member states co-financing the programme 1

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. According to Ardian's head of infrastructure investment Benoit Guillochet, the French project alone could cost the equivalent of half of the EU's new fund 2

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France is positioning itself as a single-country bidder against multi-state proposals, with Telefonica preparing the final Spanish bid while German and Dutch consortia emerge as credible competing proposals 1

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. 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 1

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Strategic Push to Boost AI Infrastructure and Computing Power

The financing strategy would rely on a combination of private equity, bank loans, and European funds, with Iliad having invested €20 billion in European infrastructure over the past decade 1

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. The consortium's ultimate aim is to develop one gigawatt of capacity, effectively doubling France's computing power, though the initial phase would likely be around 100 megawatts 2

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EDF announced tenders last year for several former industrial sites with direct grid connections to accelerate deployment timelines for data center operators 2

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. This infrastructure advantage, combined with France's low-carbon grid, positions the country to offer both available power capacity and sovereign-software capabilities.

European AI Sovereignty Takes Center Stage

AION's stated differentiator emphasizes an open-source and public-private approach, with GENCI and Inria participation positioning the facility as part of European public-research compute infrastructure, contrasting with more commercially-driven programmes like the MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW Paris-area campus 1

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. Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas framed the initiative bluntly: "Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future" 1

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The strategic context reflects ongoing pressure around European AI sovereignty, as GPU-as-a-service offerings from US providers continue to dominate European frontier-AI procurement 1

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. The initiative aims to close the gap between Europe and the United States and China, which have invested heavily in high-capacity data centers 2

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. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the body running the selection process, is expected to announce its shortlist before the end of the year, providing the next visible proof point for whether Europe's gigafactory programme can operate at the same order of magnitude as US private-sector build-outs 1

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