European Union offers €10B to build seven AI gigafactories in race against US and China

The European Union is putting €10 billion on the table to fund seven AI gigafactories. The plan represents a two-tier approach to AI infrastructure: four smaller facilities and three larger ones, spread across the bloc. How the plan evolved The roots of this initiative trace back to two overlapping programs. The first is the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which had already earmarked €10 billion for “AI Factories,” a term Brussels uses for high-performance computing centers optimized for AI workloads. Seven of these smaller-scale AI Factories were selected back in December 2024, each designed to deploy up to 25,000 H100-equivalent chips. Those facilities are anticipated to come online by 2026. Then came the InvestAI plan, announced at the AI Action Summit in February 2025. That initiative aimed to mobilize €20 billion in public-private funding for up to five larger AI Gigafactories. By mid-2026, these two tracks merged into the current seven-facility structure. Subsidy allocations break down to roughly €100 million for the smaller hubs and €200 million for the larger ones, with the rest expected to come from private investment and member state contributions. The gap Europe is trying to ...