What are Europe's AI gigafactories, and will they make Europe sovereign in AI?

In July 2026 the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, or EuroHPC, the EU's joint body for supercomputers, launched a call for consortia to build and run AI gigafactories. It describes them as large-scale sovereign AI computing infrastructure, located in EU countries and led by industry. Selection is expected in early 2027, with operations within 18 months after that.

To see why the EU wants them, start with the gap. Bruegel, a Brussels economics think tank, draws on a dataset of operational and planned sites and puts the EU at about 2 gigawatts of AI compute in 2026. Its figures exclude capacity inside American hyperscalers' existing European clouds, so they are a floor for what sits on European soil.

The call in numbers

According to Sullivan & Cromwell's summary of the tender, the call has two lots: four medium-scale sites and three large-scale ones. EuroHPC says they should span at least seven member states.

Those opening power figures look small beside the word "giga" and beside North American campuses, and the call is built for growth in later phases. A note on earlier numbers: the Commission's InvestAI plan spoke of €20 billion for up to five gigafactories, and an informal call drew 77 proposals from 16 member states. The Council gave EuroHPC the legal mandate on January 16, 2026.

Only part of the public money is firm. Up to €1 billion of EU funding for the first phase comes from the current budget. The other €4 billion is indicative and depends on the next long-term EU budget.

How the public money works

This is the clever part. The EU will not simply give these projects a grant. The public side buys computing time in advance, and acts as what the tender calls a "strategic anchor customer".

Here is a simplified example. Imagine a site whose computing hardware costs €3 billion.

1. A consortium raises the money and builds the site at its own risk.
2. The EU commits to buy computing access, capped at the equivalent of 17% of that hardware cost, according to Open Future: up to €510 million here.
3. Participating states must at least match it, for at least €1.02 billion of guaranteed public purchases in this example.
4. The operator must sell the rest of the capacity commercially.

Banks may lend more easily against a guaranteed customer. Yet the consortium still carries the risk of unsold capacity, which leads to the critics.

The critics

Open Future, a European digital policy group, points to a tension in the tender. To show viability, bidders may name global hyperscalers as anchor customers. So the companies with enough demand to fill these sites may be the same American firms the sovereignty plan aims to reduce reliance on. The tender does ask bidders for a time-bound plan to diversify their customers.

Bruegel argues that capital is not the main barrier. Getting connected quickly to the grid and getting permits matter more, it says, and with all planned projects the EU would still run far behind in 2031. It suggests redirecting subsidies toward regions that move fastest on permits, and encouraging American firms to install more chips in Europe, with voluntary labels such as "processed in the EU". Its view of sovereignty is deliberately modest: maximize local compute, whoever owns the chips.

CEPA, a transatlantic think tank, recalled in 2025 earlier European projects such as Galileo and Gaia-X, and said the plan adds supply without addressing weak demand, costly energy and regulatory uncertainty.

EuroHPC's own case is that the sites will make large-scale computing simpler and cheaper for public and private users in Europe, and strengthen resilience and strategic autonomy.

Europe's private builders are moving too

The gigafactories are not the only game. Schwarz Group, which owns Lidl and leads Cohere's financing, is investing €11 to €13 billion in a German campus expected to hold up to 100,000 AI chips, Reuters reports. Its StackIT cloud is to supply computing capacity to the Cohere and Aleph Alpha combination, which links this story to Canada. Mistral AI launched Mistral Compute in 2025, a private stack of chips and software for states and companies, and raised €3 billion in September 2026.

Canadians watching this should note the shared logic. Canada and the EU both accept foreign chips while trying to control everything above them, and Prime Minister Carney's Cohere announcement came at a Canada-EU summit.

Who could actually use a gigafactory?

EuroHPC says the sites will serve researchers, public bodies and businesses, especially start-ups, growing firms and small and medium-sized companies in participating states. Because the public buyers hold part of the capacity, some access should come through public channels, alongside the existing AI Factories that the gigafactories are meant to complement. The remainder will be sold commercially.

The tender is also open to global users, so a company outside Europe may be able to buy capacity on commercial terms. Details such as prices and access rules will depend on the winning bids, and those are not expected before early 2027. If you run a European start-up, the practical step today is to find your country's national AI Factory contact, since that route already exists.