French companies bid $10bn for one of the EU’s five planned AI gigafactory sites

A French consortium called AION, led by Iliad's cloud subsidiary Scaleway and backed by Hugging Face, Mistral-adjacent partners, GENCI, Inria, SiPearl, and others, has submitted a ~$10bn bid to host one of the EU's five planned AI gigafactories. The proposed facility would feature 200MW of capacity equivalent to over 288,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, making it the largest single-country bid in the EU's InvestAI Facility programme. The consortium differentiates itself through an open-source and public-private framing, positioning the facility as part of European public-research compute infrastructure. AION competes against multi-state proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, with EuroHPC JU expected to announce a shortlist before year-end.