A consortium of French companies led by Iliad’s cloud subsidiary Scaleway has submitted a roughly $10 billion bid to build one of the European Union’s five planned AI gigafactories on French soil, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The proposal, named the AION consortium, outlines a 200-megawatt facility centered on next-generation GPU clusters that would be equivalent to more than 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s. This bid represents the largest single-country proposal disclosed since the European Commission opened its gigafactory selection process under the InvestAI Facility.
The AION partner list reads as a near-complete roll-call of the French AI stack. Named backers include GPU and chip-design specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, model-distribution platform Hugging Face, IT-services group Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Atos’s compute subsidiary Eviden Bull, and developer-tooling company ZML. The consortium also draws operational support from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the existing AI Factory France EuroHPC project, with hosting through Opcore, Iliad’s data-centre joint venture.
The EU InvestAI Facility and Gigafactory Programme
The EU programme the bid sits inside is the InvestAI Facility, a €20 billion envelope announced earlier this year to underwrite up to five gigafactories across the bloc. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest in the initial sounding round, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland and Portugal among the member states co-financing the programme. Telefonica is preparing the final Spanish bid; the formal call window was deferred from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to give consortia time to assemble multi-billion-euro capital structures. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the body running the selection process, has not yet publicly named the bidder pool or set a final decision date. The next visible proof point will be the EuroHPC JU’s shortlist announcement, expected before the end of the year.
On the disclosed numbers, AION’s $10 billion capital commitment matches Iliad chair Xavier Niel’s longstanding framing that France needs to outspend, not match, on AI infrastructure if it intends to keep pace with the US and Chinese build-outs. Iliad has invested €20 billion in European infrastructure over the past decade, the Scaleway announcement notes; the AION figure puts roughly half that commitment into a single facility. The 288,000-H100-equivalent target is positioned as the largest single GPU cluster outside the US hyperscalers and the Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate footprint.
French AI Infrastructure Landscape
AION is not the only French-flagged AI infrastructure project the bid is competing with for capital. The MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW Paris-area campus, announced in 2025, is the parallel programme; Mistral is separately raising debt and equity for its own Sweden and Paris data-centre footprint. AION’s stated differentiator is the open-source-and-public-private framing: GENCI and Inria participation positions the facility as part of the European public-research compute infrastructure, in contrast to the more commercially-driven MGX-Mistral programme. This dual-track approach reflects broader tensions within the French AI ecosystem between private-led hyper-scale projects and state-anchored initiatives that prioritize open research and sovereign control over AI capabilities.
The strategic context the announcement leans into is the ongoing pressure on European AI sovereignty. GPU-as-a-service offerings from US providers have continued to dominate European frontier-AI procurement; OpenAI’s pause on its UK Stargate site over energy costs and regulatory uncertainty has produced a window in which a French-only proposition can credibly claim both available power capacity (France’s low-carbon grid) and a sovereign-software stack (SiPearl and Eviden hardware, Hugging Face and Kyutai software). AION’s pitch is, on Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas’s framing, that “Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future.”
Key Details and Next Steps
The Bloomberg report did not name the specific French site under consideration, the capital-stack breakdown between Iliad equity, EU grants, member-state co-financing and private debt, the construction timeline, or the formal procurement-decision date the Commission is now working to. Telefonica’s Spanish bid and German and Dutch consortia are positioned as the most credible competing proposals. AION’s position alongside the wider Google-Blackstone $25 billion TPU-cloud joint venture and the comparable US infrastructure announcements will become a public-market proxy for whether Europe’s gigafactory programme is ultimately operating at the same order of magnitude as the US private-sector build-out.
The EuroHPC JU has not yet set a final decision date. The formal call window was deferred from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to allow consortia time to assemble multi-billion-euro capital structures. The shortlist announcement is expected before the end of the year, based on the published formal-call cadence. French policymakers and industry leaders are closely watching the process, as the outcome will determine whether France secures a flagship AI infrastructure that could serve as a hub for European research, development, and commercial deployment. The AION bid, with its emphasis on open-source collaboration and public-private partnerships, aims to differentiate itself from the more secretive, commercial-focused US projects, while still attracting the scale of investment needed to compete globally.
Beyond the immediate bid, the French AI ecosystem is undergoing rapid expansion. In addition to the MGX-Mistral campus, other initiatives include the Jean Zay supercomputer upgrade, the European Processor Initiative involving SiPearl, and growing investments in data-centre cooling technologies to cope with high-density GPU clusters. France’s low-carbon nuclear-powered electricity grid provides a unique advantage for AI workloads that require substantial and reliable power, a factor that both AION and the MGX consortium are highlighting. However, regulatory hurdles, grid connection timelines, and local community opposition to large-scale data centres remain potential obstacles that the consortia must navigate.
The InvestAI Facility itself is part of a broader EU push to reduce dependency on non-European AI infrastructure. The European Commission has earmarked additional funds for AI research, skill development, and regulatory frameworks, including the AI Act. The gigafactories are intended to host large-scale training and inference workloads for European startups, universities, and public-sector organizations. If AION succeeds, France would gain a strategic asset that could attract AI talent and investment, potentially shifting the balance of AI development more toward Europe. The upcoming months will be critical as the EuroHPC JU evaluates the competing bids and decides which member states will host the five gigafactories, with the French proposal standing out for its size, scope, and collaborative partner network.
Source: TNW | Eu News