The European Union wants to build its way out of a widening gap with the United States and China, and its new AI gigafactories plan is the boldest attempt yet. The European Commission has opened a call for tenders for up to seven of these vast computing hubs, framing them as the backbone of a more self-reliant European technology base.
The initiative aims to unlock more than 30 billion euro in investment. Up to 10 billion euro would come from EU and national budgets, while private backers are expected to supply the remaining 20 billion. Brussels is betting that public money can crowd in the private capital that Europe’s chipmakers, cloud providers and research labs have struggled to attract on their own.
Each site would house tens of thousands of advanced processors, giving industry, universities and public bodies shared access to the raw power needed to train, fine-tune and run frontier AI models. The Commission argues that without such capacity at home, European firms will remain tenants on American and Chinese infrastructure, and European data will keep flowing abroad.
The tender splits the money into two lots. Smaller projects can win up to 100 million euro in early EU funding, rising to 400 million in a second phase. Larger clusters start at 200 million euro and can climb to 800 million, a scale meant to match the multi-gigawatt data centres now rising in Texas and the Gulf. The Commission set out the details in its official announcement.
Timing is tight. Bidding closes on 12 November 2026, the Commission expects to award the first projects in early 2027, and construction should begin the same year. Officials hope the first machines will come online before the decade’s midpoint, when demand for AI computing is forecast to surge.
Skeptics see hard obstacles. The gigafactories will devour electricity, and several of the regions courting them already face strained grids and high power prices. Euronews noted that securing cheap, reliable energy may prove harder than raising the cash. Others question whether Europe can source enough cutting-edge chips while export controls and supply bottlenecks persist.
The political stakes reach beyond technology. Brussels has spent two years warning that dependence on foreign compute leaves the bloc exposed on everything from defence to public administration. The gigafactories answer that worry with concrete steel and silicon rather than strategy papers.
Whether seven hubs can close the gap remains uncertain. What is clear is that the Union has finally put serious money behind its digital sovereignty rhetoric, and the coming bids will show whether Europe’s industry believes the promise.
