EU Opens Bidding for Seven AI Gigafactories, Betting €10 Billion in Public Money to Draw €20 Billion More

The European Commission has opened bidding for up to seven AI gigafactories across the bloc, a plan officials say will mobilize more than €30 billion in combined public and private money. Applications close November 12. Brussels expects to announce winners in early 2027, with construction starting that same year.

Brussels puts up to €10 billion of European and national funding on the table and hopes that draws at least €20 billion more from private investors. That's a two-to-one leverage bet on taxpayer money working as bait.

Each facility is supposed to house at least 100,000 advanced AI processors, about four times the capacity of data centers currently running in the EU. Poland's bid, for comparison, targets a medium-scale project starting at 25,000 AI accelerators and scaling to 75,000, according to Notes from Poland.

Who's Actually Bidding

This isn't a one-country show. Czechia has thrown its hat in, backed by its government, according to Radio Prague International. Poland formally joined the joint procurement agreement on July 28, with Deputy Digital Affairs Minister Dariusz Standerski signing the deal on behalf of Warsaw.

Standerski told the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita that Poland is chasing a medium-scale facility that could pull in more than 10 billion zloty, about €2.3 billion, in investment. He said corporate interest is "enormous" and that computing capacity will likely be sold before the gigafactory even opens.

Under the funding structure Standerski described, Poland and the EU would each buy 17% of the facility's computing power, with the remaining two-thirds sold commercially by the winning private consortium. Poland has identified 10 potential sites, but Standerski said the government won't pick the location. That call goes to whichever consortium wins the EU tender.

According to Brussels Signal, an earlier non-binding call for expressions of interest pulled in 76 submissions across 60 sites in 16 member states, more than the Commission expected. That suggests genuine appetite, at least on paper, though expressions of interest are not binding bids with money attached.

The Funding Mechanics

Money flows through the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, or EuroHPC JU, which will coordinate with 18 member states to jointly buy computing access from whichever sites get picked. Two funding tracks are on offer: one capped at €500 million per facility, another up to €1 billion, both released in phases tied to development milestones.

EuroHPC JU plans to select seven projects total in this first round, split between four medium-scale facilities and three large-scale ones, according to Notes from Poland.

The Commission also signed letters of intent with American chipmakers AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm to smooth access to hardware, tying that move to the EU-US trade agreement. Brussels is running a program explicitly framed as reducing dependence on American tech while still needing American chips to build it.

The Sovereignty Angle, and Its Limits

EU Commission Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen has called large-scale computing power a strategic necessity as AI development speeds up. Under EuroHPC rules amended in January, entities from outside the scheme can't join a gigafactory consortium, and Virkkunen has said majority ownership of the facilities should stay European.

That's the sovereignty pitch: keep control European even while leaning on American silicon. It's a reasonable position for a bloc worried about strategic dependence on any single foreign supplier, whether that's chips from the US or rare earths from China. Critics of that framing would point out the contradiction of needing letters of intent with three US chipmakers to make a "sovereignty" plan work at all.

Government-backed industrial bets on emerging tech have a mixed track record, and €10 billion in public money committed before a single winner is picked is real exposure for taxpayers across 18 member states if the private capital doesn't fully materialize. No source here shows binding private investment commitments yet, only expressions of interest and government pledges.

The program folds into a bigger EU push. In June, the Commission unveiled draft laws aimed at cutting reliance on American cloud and chip providers, according to Brussels Signal. Whether that push actually reduces dependence, or just adds a European layer on top of the same American hardware, will be one of the first things to watch when award decisions land in early 2027.