French Companies Bid $10bn for One of the EU’s Five Planned AI Gigafactory Sites
May 20, 2026 – 1:59 pm
A consortium led by Scaleway, a cloud subsidiary of Iliad, backed by GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and other partners, aims to establish France as a single-country bidder against multi-state proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The AION consortium proposes a 200-megawatt facility with next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation NVIDIA H100s—the largest single-country bid disclosed since the European Commission initiated its gigafactory selection process.
Consortium Members
The AION partner list includes:
- VSORA and SiPearl (GPU and chip specialists)
- Kyutai and H Company (model labs)
- Hugging Face (model distribution platform)
- Sopra Steria (IT services group)
- Artefact (consultancy)
- Eviden Bull, an Atos subsidiary
- ZML (developer tooling)
Operational Support and Hosting
The consortium receives operational support from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the existing AI Factory France EuroHPC project, with hosting provided by Opcore, Iliad’s data center joint venture.
EU Program and Bidding Context
The bid is part of the EU’s InvestAI Facility, a €20bn initiative to fund up to five gigafactories across the bloc. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest, with final bids expected in the first half of 2026. Telefonica is preparing Spain’s final bid, having deferred the formal call window from late 2025.
Financial Commitment
AION’s $10bn capital commitment matches Iliad’s longstanding vision that France needs to outperform, not merely match, US and Chinese AI infrastructure investments. Over the past decade, Iliad has invested €20bn in European infrastructure, with AION allocating roughly half of that commitment to a single facility.
Differentiator
AION distinguishes itself through its open-source-and-public-private approach, positioning the facility as part of Europe’s public research compute infrastructure, unlike the more commercially focused MGX-Mistral program.