17/08/2026
The race to build Europe’s AI future is officially on: Brussels wants to build the computing power to keep Europe’s AI ambitions on European soil (as if that would make much of a difference!) – and the price tag is enormous. Back in February 2025, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled InvestAI at the AI Action Summit in Paris: a plan to mobilise €200 billion for AI investment across the bloc, anchored by a dedicated €20 billion European fund for AI “gigafactories.” She described it as a public-private partnership on the scale of CERN, open to researchers and companies of every size, not just the biggest players.
So, where’s the gigafactory?
Despite the headline-grabbing name, “Europe’s first AI gigafactory” is still a work in progress. On 30 July 2026, the Commission formally opened a call for bids to build seven AI gigafactories across the EU, part of a €30 billion initiative aimed at reducing Europe’s reliance on American and Chinese computing infrastructure. The programme commits €10 billion in public funding alongside a target of €20 billion in private investment. An earlier informal call drew 77 proposals to set up gigafactories across 16 member states and 60 different sites, with the official EuroHPC tender following this summer.
European cities are lobbying hard. Vienna, Prague, and the Spanish town of Mora la Nova have all submitted bids, alongside unnamed projects in Germany and the Netherlands – every region betting that hosting a gigafactory means hosting Europe’s AI future.
Timeline: what happens next
- Now – 12 November 2026: Bidding window open; consortia can propose single-country or cross-border projects.
- Early 2027: Award decisions expected, allowing construction of selected gigafactories to begin the same year.
- 2027 onward: First gigafactories targeted to become operational.
The EU fund is designed to back up five large-scale compute sites, each equipped to support frontier model training with more than 100,000 advanced AI processors.
The private sector isn’t waiting for Brussels
Commercial players aren’t waiting for the EU’s paperwork. Stargate Norway, a 100,000-GPU facility in Narvik backed by OpenAI, Nscale, and Aker, is already under construction, running on Norwegian hydropower with first GPUs expected online by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, in Portugal, Microsoft and Nscale are expanding the Start Campus site in Sines, starting with over 12,000 Nvidia GPUs in early 2026 and scaling toward more than 66,000 by late 2027, and Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom have unveiled a 10,000-GPU “industrial AI cloud” in Germany, explicitly framed as a precursor to a future national gigafactory.
The scale gap: EU vs. US
To understand why Europe calls this an “AI Continent” strategy rather than just an infrastructure programme, look at the numbers on the other side of the Atlantic. In the US, Stargate alone (the OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle joint venture) is a $500 billion, multi-year commitment to build 10 GW of AI compute, with over $400 billion reportedly already in motion. Add in the big four hyperscalers’ 2026 capital spending (roughly $725 billion combined, up nearly 80% year-on-year) and the US private sector alone is deploying more in a single year than the EU’s entire InvestAI initiative aims to mobilise, public and private combined, over several. Europe’s €200 billion figure is real money, but next to a US AI buildout approaching $1.5 trillion cumulatively since 2020, it’s a fraction of the scale. That gap is exactly what InvestAI is aiming to close.
Sovereignty, not just servers
This is the tension at the heart of Europe’s AI strategy: public money and public procurement move on a ‘Brussels timeline’ (deliberate, consensus-driven, multi-country) while private capital is already pouring concrete. The EU’s gigafactories aren’t meant to compete head-on with hyperscalers like Microsoft or OpenAI’s partners; they’re meant to guarantee that European researchers, startups, and industrial players get sovereign access to frontier-scale compute, on European terms, under European rules.
Whether “Europe’s first AI gigafactory” ends up being a Commission-backed site in Vienna or Prague, or whether the commercial builders in Norway and Portugal get there, the race to build Europe’s AI backbone has genuinely started, even if the finish line for the flagship EU project is still roughly a year and a half away.
EDRi (European Digital Rights)
CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies)