French firms are offering $10 billion for one of the five planned AI gigafactory locations in the EU.

      The AION consortium, led by Scaleway and supported by Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and partners close to Mistral, is positioning France as a solo contender against multi-national bids from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. According to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday, this consortium of French firms headed by Iliad’s cloud subsidiary Scaleway has made an approximate $10 billion offer to establish one of the planned AI gigafactories in the European Union on French territory.

      The AION consortium plans to create a 200-megawatt facility focused on next-generation GPU clusters, equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s, marking it as the largest single-country bid revealed since the European Commission initiated its gigafactory selection process. The list of AION partners includes a nearly complete roster of the French AI sector, featuring backers such as GPU and chip design specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, the model distribution platform Hugging Face, IT services group Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Atos’s computing branch Eviden Bull, and developer tools company ZML.

      Additionally, the consortium receives operational assistance from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the current AI Factory France EuroHPC project, with hosting provided via Opcore, Iliad’s data center joint venture. This bid is part of the InvestAI Facility, a €20 billion initiative announced earlier this year to fund up to five gigafactories across the EU. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest in the initial round, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and Portugal among the member states co-financing the project.

      Telefonica is finalizing the Spanish bid; the formal call timeline has been postponed from late 2025 to the first half of 2026, allowing consortia time to assemble the necessary multi-billion-euro financing. Given the disclosed figures, AION’s $10 billion commitment aligns with Iliad chair Xavier Niel’s long-standing assertion that France must increase its spending on AI infrastructure to keep up with the US and China.

      According to the Scaleway announcement, Iliad has invested €20 billion in European infrastructure over the last decade, with the AION proposal accounting for about half of that investment in a single facility. The target of 288,000-H100-equivalent units aims to be the largest single GPU cluster outside of the major US hyperscalers and Microsoft-OpenAI's Stargate infrastructure.

      AION is not the sole French AI infrastructure project vying for funding; the MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW campus in the Paris area, unveiled in 2025, represents a competing initiative, while Mistral is separately seeking debt and equity for its own data centers in Sweden and Paris. AION distinguishes itself with its emphasis on open-source and public-private collaboration: the involvement of GENCI and Inria frames the facility as part of European public research computing infrastructure, contrasting with the more commercially oriented MGX-Mistral project.

      The announcement taps into the broader theme of ongoing European AI sovereignty concerns. US-based GPU-as-a-service offerings continue to dominate European frontier-AI procurement, while OpenAI's pause on its UK Stargate site due to energy costs and regulatory issues has created an opportunity for a French-only proposition to credibly argue both available power capacity (from France’s low-carbon grid) and a sovereign software stack (including SiPearl and Eviden hardware, as well as Hugging Face and Kyutai software).

      As Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas puts it, AION's proposal asserts that “Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future.” The Bloomberg report did not specify the exact French location under consideration, the breakdown of the capital stack involving Iliad equity, EU grants, member-state co-financing, and private debt, the construction timeline, or the formal decision date the Commission is currently working toward.

      The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the organization managing the selection process, has yet to publicly disclose the bidder pool or establish a final decision date. Competing proposals from Telefonica’s Spanish bid and consortia from Germany and the Netherlands are currently viewed as the most credible. The next significant milestone will be the EuroHPC JU’s shortlist announcement, which is expected before the end of the year based on the formal call cadence released earlier this year. AION's position alongside the broader Google-Blackstone $25 billion TPU cloud joint venture and similar US infrastructure announcements will serve as a public-market indicator of whether Europe’s gigafactory initiative can operate on a comparable scale to the US private-sector developments.