EU AI gigafactories: €30B call opens, compute lands 2028

The European Commission opened bidding today for seven AI gigafactories, putting €10 billion of public money behind a €30 billion push to give the bloc enough compute to train frontier models without renting American infrastructure. If you sell into the EU or hold EU customer data, the useful detail isn't the headline number. It's the calendar.

What actually happened

Per Euronews and AP, the call covers up to seven sites, each holding at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips — roughly four times more powerful than the data centers the EU runs today. The bloc currently operates 19 AI data centers; the seven new builds would more than double European capacity.

The money splits three ways: €10 billion public, €20 billion expected from private investors. And here's the part worth reading twice — of that public €10 billion, Brussels has committed roughly €1 billion. Another €5 billion is penciled against the next Multiannual Financial Framework, which has not been agreed, with €5 billion more from member states.

Bids close 12 November 2026. Construction starts early 2027. First facilities come online mid-2028. The Commission's own page notes the informal interest round drew 77 proposals across 16 member states and 60 sites — demand is not the problem here.

Why EU AI infrastructure matters for your business

Two years is a long time to hold a plan. If you're architecting around EU-sovereign compute because a customer asked where the model runs, this announcement does not answer that question for 2026, 2027, or most of 2028. It answers it for a version of your business that doesn't exist yet.

What you can act on now is narrower and more useful: data residency is a vendor-region setting, not a sovereignty guarantee. Your Frankfurt endpoint is still a US company's control plane. If that distinction matters to a contract you're signing, put it in the contract — don't wait for a gigafactory to make it true.

The second read is on pricing. Two-thirds of this budget is private capital that hasn't been raised against public funding that hasn't been appropriated. Participating governments get a proportionate share of compute for public projects and research; consortia may set aside hardware for startups and scale-ups, but nothing in the call guarantees you a cheap token. Plan your model spend on the vendors billing you today.

Sources: Euronews, AP via ABC News, European Commission.