French firms have submitted a $10 billion bid for one of the five AI gigafactory locations planned by the EU.

      A consortium led by Scaleway, with support from Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and various partners, is aiming to establish France as a sole contender against joint bids from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The French consortium, spearheaded by Iliad's cloud division Scaleway, has proposed a bid of around $10 billion to construct one of the EU's anticipated AI gigafactories on French territory, as reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday.

      The AION consortium is suggesting the development of a 200-megawatt facility focused on next-generation GPU clusters, comparable to over 288,000 current Nvidia H100 GPUs. This marks the most significant single-country bid announced since the European Commission commenced its gigafactory selection process. The partners within AION represent a nearly complete roster of the French AI landscape, including GPU and chip-design firms VSORA and SiPearl, model laboratories Kyutai and H Company, model-distribution platform Hugging Face, IT services company Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Atos's Eviden Bull, and developer-tools provider ZML.

      Moreover, the consortium receives operational backing from GENCI and Inria, co-leading the current AI Factory France EuroHPC initiative, with hosting facilitated by Opcore, Iliad's data center joint venture. This bid is part of the InvestAI Facility, a €20 billion fund announced earlier this year to support up to five gigafactories throughout the EU. The European Commission has received 76 expressions of interest in the initial phase, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and Portugal being among the member states co-financing the project.

      Telefonica is finalizing Spain's bid; the official call period has been postponed from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to allow consortia to establish multi-billion-euro financing frameworks. AION's $10 billion commitment aligns with Iliad chair Xavier Niel’s long-held view that France must invest more in AI infrastructure to remain competitive with the US and China. Iliad noted a €20 billion investment in European infrastructure over the past ten years, indicating that AION’s bid allocates nearly half of that investment for this single facility.

      The target of 288,000 H100-equivalent units is touted as the largest standalone GPU cluster outside of major US hyperscalers and Microsoft-OpenAI's Stargate operations. However, AION faces competition from other French AI infrastructure initiatives for funding, notably the MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW campus in the Paris area, announced in 2025, while Mistral is separately securing funds for its own data centers in Sweden and Paris.

      AION differentiates itself by promoting an open-source and public-private framework, with the participation of GENCI and Inria framing the center as part of the European public-research computing infrastructure, contrasting with the more commercially focused MGX-Mistral initiative. The strategic backdrop of this announcement emphasizes the ongoing challenges to European AI sovereignty.

      US provider GPU-as-a-service offerings continue to dominate the AI procurement landscape in Europe. OpenAI’s reconsideration of its UK Stargate site due to energy costs and regulatory issues has opened a window for a France-centered proposal to reliably present both available energy capacity (thanks to France's low-carbon grid) and a native software foundation (utilizing SiPearl and Eviden hardware along with Hugging Face and Kyutai software).

      As articulated by Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas, AION's assertion is that “Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future.” The Bloomberg article did not specify the exact French location considered, the breakdown of funding between Iliad equity, EU grants, member-state financing, and private debt, or details regarding the construction timeline and the procurement decision date the Commission is currently addressing. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which oversees the selection process, has yet to publicly announce the list of bidders or set a final decision date. Telefonica's Spanish proposal alongside German and Dutch consortia is seen as the most credible alternative.

      The next significant indication will come with the EuroHPC JU's announcement of the shortlist, expected before the year's end according to the formal timeline published earlier. AION’s role, along with the wider 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 operates at a scale comparable to the US private-sector expansion.