The AION consortium, featuring French state-backed energy provider EDF, has launched an ambitious €10bn ($11.6bn) bid to build a massive Artificial Intelligence (AI) Gigafactory in France. The initiative aims to tap into the European Union’s €20bn InvestAI infrastructure fund to secure regional digital sovereignty and rival tech capabilities in the US and China.
The alliance joins eight major French firms representing energy, telecommunications, cloud architecture, and financial sectors:
- EDF: Providing low-carbon electricity and direct high-voltage grid connections.
- Orange & the Iliad Group: Offering robust telecommunication and digital infrastructure.
- Scaleway (Iliad’s data centre subsidiary): slated to invest up to €4 billion in GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) clusters.
- Bull (Atos group) & Capgemini: Supplying supercomputing power, sovereign IT services, and systems integration.
- Artefact: Leading data services and specialised AI consultancy.
- Ardian: A premier private equity firm handling infrastructure investment and capital deployment.
The planned facility aims to fundamentally reshape Europe’s compute footprint. The consortium plans an initial phase of 100 MW, scaling up to an ultimate capacity of 1 GW. This would effectively double France’s current data centre capacity. To solve energy bottlenecks, EDF is repurposing former industrial sites that feature pre-existing, direct connections to high-voltage power grids.
The architecture will handle massive AI training workloads using hardware sourced flexibly from Nvidia, AMD, or alternative next-generation microchip suppliers. The AION Consortium says its proposal operates on four guiding commitments: Performance – establishing top-tier, world-class compute clusters to accelerate industrial AI adoption; Trust – ensuring European strategic autonomy by maintaining local control over the entire supply chain; Openness – cultivating partnerships and supporting the deployment of open-source models; and Responsibility – controlling environmental footprints by utilising France’s abundant nuclear and hydro-powered grid.
The consortium leverages the complementary strengths of a wide spectrum of benchmark players covering the entire value chain: supercomputers, microprocessors, quantum computing solutions and critical infrastructure, expertise in energy, cloud platforms, sovereign AI and the development and operation of data centre infrastructure, as well as AI deployment capabilities, investment capacity and industrial know-how.
AION will also be able to draw on a broad ecosystem made up of technological, academic and industrial partners, as well as user companies such as Le Crédit Agricole, Equans, Future4Care, GENCI, Hugging Face, INRIA, Kyutai, LightOn, Multiverse Computing, Nokia, Opcore, Quandela, PariSanté Campus, Schneider Electric, SiPearl, Sopra Steria, Verne, VSORA and ZML.
The European AI Gigafactory scheme is a core component of the European Union’s InvestAI initiative, a public-private programme launched by the European Commission. The strategy aims to position Europe as a global leader in frontier AI development, specifically targeting “sovereign compute capacity” to reduce dependency on American and Chinese tech conglomerates.
The EU operates a two-tiered infrastructure strategy. AI Factories are a network of 19 existing, smaller-scale hubs overseen by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. They provide distributed, open-access compute for European startups, small-and-medium enterprises and researchers. AI Gigafactories are the newest, extreme-scale tier. The EU is funding up to five mega-facilities across the continent. These massive hubs are designed to train complex, next-generation foundational AI models containing trillions of parameters. To earn a “Gigafactory” designation from the EU, a facility must meet massive hardware benchmarks
Gigafactories require enormous power architectures, generally demanding 200-500 MW of contracted power upfront, with long-term scaling targets reaching up to 1 GW. The total framework leverages a layered public-private financing pool, the InvestAI Fund. The European Commission provides €20bn specifically for the Gigafactory track.
The EuroHPC selects winning bids based on strict technical and geographical parameters. Siting is disqualified from highly congested metropolitan tech hubs (like Dublin, Frankfurt, or Amsterdam). Bids must prove immediate access to nuclear, hydro, or abundant renewable grids. High-capacity, deterministic optical fibre routing is required. Winning sites must natively support high-speed data transfer between regions while respecting strict EU data-residency rules. Gigafactories must demonstrate robust commercial viability. Bids must include explicit commitments from enterprise users to ensure the computing infrastructure is heavily utilised by industry.
Because the EU intends to select a limited number of sites, nations are forming opposing blocks. The AION consortium’s $10bn bid represents the largest unified, single-country application. It banks heavily on France’s state-supported nuclear grid and low energy costs. Competing proposals are emerging out of Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, where multi-country partnerships are pitching decentralised or joint regional clusters to capture a share of the €20bn fund.
“France has major strengths to lead the way in the development of AI infrastructure, including competitively-priced, sovereign and low-carbon electricity,” said Beatrice Bigois, Group Senior Executive Vice-President, Customers & Energy Services, at EDF. “With this consortium, we’re embracing a shared ambition to build a world-class European AI gigafactory based in France, and EDF intends to fully contribute to this strategic momentum for Europe.”
