The EU's €30bn AI Gigafactory Plan: What Europe's Sovereign Compute Push Means for Your Stack

The call, run by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, invites consortia to bid to build and operate up to seven gigafactories across the bloc. Bids are open until 12 November 2026, with winners due to be named in early 2027 and facilities expected to begin operating around mid-2028.

The funding is split into two lots. The first supports up to four projects, each eligible for up to €100 million in EU money in an initial phase and up to €400 million in a second. The second lot supports up to three larger projects, each eligible for up to €200 million and then up to €800 million. Member states match the EU contribution, and the private sector is expected to supply most of the total. An earlier informal call drew 77 expressions of interest across 16 member states and 60 sites, which is why the Commission widened the plan from an initial four or five factories to seven.

The gigafactories are the infrastructure pillar of the Commission's "AI Continent" plan and its InvestAI initiative, the €20 billion facility Ursula von der Leyen announced at the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, with the stated ambition of building a European answer to CERN. The reasoning is straightforward. Training frontier AI needs enormous, specialised compute; most of that capacity today sits in the United States and China; and Europe does not want to rent its AI future from either.

Access to the public share of the compute is the payoff for member states. In return for their funding, governments get a proportionate slice of capacity to allocate to public projects, research centres and AI labs of their choosing. Operating costs, though, fall on the private partners, who are expected to make each site financially self-sustaining through their own commercial services.

This is the tension at the centre of the story, and the Commission does not really hide it. The gigafactories are meant to cut Europe's dependence on foreign cloud and chips, yet the specialised processors that make them work will be supplied under letters of intent the Commission signed with three US chipmakers: AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Those letters followed the EU-US trade agreement, and the tender lets hardware be bought from providers in Europe or "like-minded countries".

So the infrastructure will be European-owned and European-sited, but the silicon underneath it will, for now, be American. The Commission has written anti-lock-in measures into the tender criteria, which is itself a quiet admission of the exposure. It is a clean illustration of a point this site returns to often: sovereignty is layered. You can own the data centre and still depend on the layer below it. That does not make the plan pointless, because owning the compute and the operational control is a real gain, but "sovereign" is a direction of travel here, not a finished state.

Partly. The headline "over €30 billion" figure is mostly aspirational: roughly two-thirds is expected private investment that has not been committed, and the EU's own share leans on the next Multiannual Financial Framework, the bloc's long-term budget, which member states are still negotiating. According to reporting by Euronews, the Commission can firmly commit only around €1 billion under the current budget, with the rest of its contribution contingent on that future settlement.

The initiative has also drawn criticism for repeated delays, and, like most large EU infrastructure programmes, for tending to favour the member states with the deepest pockets. Ten countries have signalled interest in hosting a factory, and France has said it intends to bid alone. None of that sinks the plan, but it is worth reading the "€30 billion" and "mid-2028" as ambitions rather than settled facts.

You are not building a gigafactory, but the principle scales down exactly. The EU is spending billions to move control of a foundational layer, compute, closer to home, because depending on a foreign-controlled layer is a strategic risk. Your business sits several layers up, on cloud, AI models, storage and identity that carry the same shape of exposure, and you can act on yours now rather than in 2028.

Two questions are worth asking. Which layers of our stack are controlled from a single foreign jurisdiction? And what would it cost us if access to one of them changed? Sovereign-by-jurisdiction options already exist at the layers you actually buy: European clouds such as OVHcloud and Scaleway, and European models such as Mistral. The gigafactories are Europe's long game. Your stack is the part you can measure today.

The compute question the EU is spending €30 billion on plays out, in miniature, across the tools your business runs on every day, which carry very different levels of sovereignty risk. You can score any tool free with SovereigntyScore, or get a full Full Stack Audit for €99: a complete risk breakdown, scored European alternatives, and a step-by-step migration plan for each tool.

Score a tool free  |  Get your Full Stack Audit for €99

Related reading: The Fable 5 Shutdown: What a 19-Day AI Blackout Taught Europe About Sovereignty · France Drops Palantir for ChapsVision · What is European Digital Sovereignty? · European Alternatives to AWS.

Sources: European Commission, Silicon Republic, Euronews and Eunews. This article is independent analysis and does not constitute legal advice.