Brussels has decided it's tired of renting someone else's cloud. The European Commission has opened a tender to build seven AI gigafactories — data centers purpose-built for training large language models rather than everyday computing. The plan puts €10 billion of public money on the table, with another roughly €20 billion expected from private investors and member states.
Bids close November 12, winners get announced in early 2027, and construction is meant to start as soon as contracts are signed. The Commission's own timeline has the first sites operational by mid-2028. Ten countries have already flagged interest — Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Portugal and Spain — and both single countries and multi-country consortia can bid.
Each gigafactory is required to house at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips, several times the scale of anything currently running in the EU. Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm have all signed letters of intent to supply hardware, so the dependence on American chipmakers isn't going away — what changes is where the chips physically sit and who controls the data running through them.
The reasoning is straightforward: all five major cloud providers serving Europe are American companies, meaning the data used to train European AI models routinely passes through infrastructure governed by US law. Commission executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen called access to raw computing power a "strategic necessity" for the continent.
The plan has real weak spots. Electricity in Europe costs two to three times more than in the US or China, which makes running these facilities inherently less competitive. French President Macron has separately complained that Europe still lacks enough strong homegrown AI companies to make use of the hardware once it exists. And the gigafactory idea itself has already slipped several times since it was first floated at the Paris AI summit in February 2025, so skepticism about the 2028 target is fair.
