On Thursday, the European Union launched a giant call for proposals to try to catch up in artificial intelligence, aiming to mobilize 30 billion euros of investments to build its first “AI gigafactories,” computing infrastructures offering massive processing power.
This launch constitutes a major milestone in our ambition to make Europe a “continent of AI,” said Henna Virkkunen, Vice-President of the Commission in charge of the Digital portfolio, seeing access to this enormous processing capacity as a “strategic necessity.”
This call for proposals, which will be co-financed by 18 EU member states (including France, Germany, Italy and Spain), aims to create seven “AI gigafactories,” and will close in November.
It consists of two lots: the first will cover four projects, each endowed with a total of 500 million euros of European funds. The second lot will aim to develop three additional gigafactories, even more powerful, each receiving one billion euros of EU funds.
The participating countries will provide funding comparable to that of the EU. In total, the call for proposals is therefore expected to mobilize around 10 billion euros of public money, to which 20 billion from the private sector will be added.
The laureates will be chosen in the early part of next year, with construction expected in the first quarter of 2027, and first operations the following year.
These gigafactories must be installed in the EU and meet sovereignty criteria. Nevertheless, Brussels has signed agreements with the American manufacturers AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm to source processors, even though it hopes in due course to also equip itself with European chips.
Their enormous computing power (equivalent to at least 75,000 high-performance processors per project in Lot 1, and 100,000 for Lot 2) will then be made available to European companies, researchers, universities and other bodies. To get things moving, the EU and the funders will commit to acquiring a portion of these processing capacities.
This initiative is part of Brussels’ strategy to make Europe, which has so far lagged behind the United States and China, one of the leading continents in AI, thanks to a plan unveiled last year to mobilize a total of 200 billion euros.
The EU has already equipped itself over the past two years with 19 AI “factories” either in development or in operation, of smaller size. This call for proposals aims to scale up.
