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

      A consortium known as AION, led by Scaleway and supported by Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and partners associated with Mistral, is establishing France as a lone bidder against multi-country proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.

      According to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday, a group of French companies, spearheaded by Iliad's cloud subsidiary Scaleway, has placed a bid of approximately $10 billion to construct one of the planned AI gigafactories in the European Union on French territory.

      The AION consortium is suggesting a facility with a capacity of 200 megawatts that will focus on advanced GPU clusters, which would be equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100 GPUs, marking the largest single-country bid revealed since the European Commission began its gigafactory selection process.

      The list of AION partners largely represents the French AI industry, with notable supporters including GPU and chip design experts VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, the model distribution platform Hugging Face, IT services provider Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Eviden Bull from Atos, and developer tooling firm ZML.

      The consortium is also receiving operational backing from GENCI and Inria, who are co-leaders of the existing AI Factory France EuroHPC initiative, with data center support provided by Opcore, Iliad's joint venture.

      The bid is part of the InvestAI Facility, which encompasses a €20 billion budget announced earlier this year to finance up to five gigafactories within the EU. The European Commission has received 76 expressions of interest during the initial phase, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and Portugal participating in co-funding the program.

      Telefonica is currently finalizing the Spanish bid, with the official application period postponed from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to allow consortia sufficient time to organize multi-billion-euro investment structures.

      AION’s $10 billion commitment aligns with Iliad chairman Xavier Niel’s consistent approach emphasizing that France must invest more heavily in AI infrastructure to remain competitive with the US and China.

      In the past decade, Iliad has invested €20 billion in European infrastructure, as noted in the Scaleway announcement; this AION bid allocates about half of that investment to a single facility.

      The target of 288,000 equivalent Nvidia H100 GPUs aims to create the largest single GPU cluster outside of US hyperscale companies and the Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate presence.

      However, AION faces competition from other French AI infrastructure initiatives seeking funding. The MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW campus in the Paris area, announced for 2025, represents a parallel effort. Mistral is also independently raising capital for its own data center projects in Sweden and Paris.

      AION emphasizes its unique positioning through an open-source and public-private partnership framework, in contrast to the more commercially focused MGX-Mistral initiative, with the participation of GENCI and Inria helping to categorize this facility within the European public-research computing infrastructure.

      The strategic context of the announcement highlights the ongoing concern for European AI autonomy. US GPU-as-a-service offerings have dominated the procurement of frontier AI in Europe; OpenAI’s suspension of its UK Stargate site due to energy costs and regulatory issues has opened an opportunity for a French-only approach to claim advantages in power availability (thanks to France's low-carbon grid) and a sovereign software stack (with hardware from SiPearl and Eviden, and software from Hugging Face and Kyutai).

      AION’s proposal, as described by Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas, asserts that "Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future."

      The Bloomberg report did not disclose the specific location within France being considered, the breakdown of the capital structure between Iliad equity, EU grants, member-state co-financing, and private debt, the timeline for construction, or the formal procurement decision date currently being established by the Commission.

      The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which is overseeing the selection process, has not yet publicly identified the bidders or set an official decision date. The Spanish bid from Telefonica, along with proposals from German and Dutch consortia, are positioned as the most credible competing submissions.

      The next significant development will be the announcement of the EuroHPC JU shortlist, expected before the end of the year based on the formal-call timeline released earlier this year.

      AION’s efforts, alongside the larger Google-Blackstone $25 billion TPU-cloud joint venture and similar US infrastructure initiatives, will serve as a public market indicator of whether Europe’s gigafactory program is operating at a comparable scale to the US private sector initiatives.