EU opens AI gigafactory race to cut reliance on US cloud

The European Union has initiated the bidding process for as many as seven AI “gigafactories” as part of its procurement program aimed at mobilizing more than 30 billion euros in public and private investments and enabling European firms to tap into the computing power they need to develop cutting-edge AI models.

Brussels wishes to have more of the required hardware for forthcoming AI technologies, instead of relying on the cloud offerings of U.S. companies.

This decision arrives at a time when computing capability has turned into one of the major impediments in this industry. Advanced AI models can only be trained using clusters containing tens of thousands of top-notch accelerators, and officials in Europe understand that the existing public infrastructure has come under heavy strain.

The initiative is part of a larger plan by the Commission called the AI Continent initiative, aimed at achieving a sovereign AI computing capacity.

Furthermore, the initiative shows a trend that has been identified by Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index, revealing that countries around the world are beginning to treat AI infrastructure as a strategic national asset within the same terms as semiconductors, energy, and data.

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