The European Union (EU) has launched a call for tenders to establish up to seven AI gigafactories across Europe, as part of its latest major push to accelerate Europe’s technological sovereignty and ambition of becoming the AI Continent.
The EU is offering 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion) in funding for firms to erect seven AI gigafactories as it seeks to close the AI gap with U.S. and China. The European Commission said that it would like the public financing to draw an additional 20 billion euros ($22.8 billion) in private investment.
It added that the initiative will expand Europe’s AI computing capacity and give start-ups, scale-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises, industry, academia and public authorities access to infrastructure for training, inference and fine-tuning advanced frontier AI models. The AI Gigafactories will combine advanced AI processors, software and cloud technology stacks, high-speed connectivity and energy-efficient data centres.
Together with Europe’s network of 19 AI Factories, they will strengthen Europe’s technological leadership, resilience and strategic autonomy. The initiative will also ensure that Europe can develop advanced AI on its own infrastructure, in line with EU rules and values. AI technologies developed in the AI Gigafactories will follow EU standards on data protection, safety, security and ethics.
Firms can now bid for contracts to build gigafactories that are planned to have at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips, making them roughly four times more powerful than the data centers currently running in the EU. The EU’s current computing power, delivered by a network of 19 AI data centers from Finland to Spain, will more than double when these seven gigafactories come online.
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and Member States will jointly procure compute access time from the selected AI Gigafactories. Eighteen Member States have signed a joint procurement agreement with the EuroHPC JU: Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden.
The procurement process will support up to seven AI Gigafactories across two consecutive development phases and two lots, with participating Member States matching EU funding. Public funding acts as a powerful catalyst for the initiative, driving the deep private investment required to construct and operate these facilities.
The call for tenders closes on November 12, 2026. Following an evaluation process managed by the EuroHPC JU, award decisions are expected by early 2027. The necessary framework and specific contracts will then be signed to allow construction to begin in 2027. Selected AI Gigafactories are expected to begin operations within a maximum of 18 months from the signature.
Strategic Necessity For AI Development
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission Executive Vice President overseeing tech sovereignty, said that access to the raw scale of computing power within AI gigafactories is a “strategic necessity for Europe as AI development accelerates.”
The efforts by Brussels to establish “tech sovereignty” have gained urgency as leaders worry about dependence on technologies from foreign providers, which they say could be “weaponized” against Europeans. U.S. President Donald Trump has railed against the EU over its tech regulations and China has limited the supply of minerals critical to the sector.
According to a 2025 assessment by the U.S. Federal Reserve, Europe lags far behind the U.S. and China in crucial sectors for the development of AI. China has an enormous electrical power capacity for data centers while the U.S. bags the lion’s share of private AI investment.
According to a Commission report presented to European Parliament in June, Europe doesn’t manufacture many of the millions of components needed for data centers and electricity in the EU can cost double or triple what it does in the U.S. and China.
The report, which listed the bloc’s top five cloud service providers as all American, said, “European businesses and public authorities will continue to rely on US AI providers to the detriment of European service providers struggling to work at the frontier.” “Dependence on hyperscale cloud and AI computing service providers, particularly for highly critical use cases, will continue to expose data to third-country access and carry risks to service continuity, endangering operational autonomy,” it added.
While political leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron have raised the alarm about Europe lacking homegrown AI companies, deep anxieties run rife across the continent about the economic disruption and privacy implications of the nascent technology.
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