tech
French companies bid $10bn for one of the EU’s five planned AI gigafactory sites
A Scaleway-led AION consortium, with backing from Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and Mistral-adjacent partners, is positioning France as a single-country bidder against multi-state proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
TL;DR
- AION consortium, led by Scaleway (Iliad's cloud subsidiary), has bid $10 billion for an AI gigafactory in France.
- The proposed facility would feature GPU clusters equivalent to over 288,000 Nvidia H100s.
- The consortium includes key French AI players like VSORA, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and Eviden.
- The bid is part of the EU's InvestAI Facility program, aiming to underwrite up to five gigafactories.
- AION's bid emphasizes an open-source and public-private approach, contrasting with more commercially driven programs.
- The initiative aims to enhance European AI sovereignty and reduce reliance on US providers.
- Competing bids are expected from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
- The European Commission has deferred the formal call window for bids to the first half of 2026.