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

AION, led by Scaleway with Iliad backing, is bidding about $10bn to build an EU AI gigafactory in France. The proposed facility would deliver 200MW of capacity centered on next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to more than 288,000 Nvidia H100s. The consortium includes a broad set of French AI and infrastructure partners, including VSORA and SiPearl for chips, Kyutai and H Company for models, Hugging Face for model distribution, Sopra Steria and Artefact for IT and consultancy, Eviden Bull for compute, and ZML for developer tooling. Operational support comes from GENCI and Inria, with hosting via Opcore, Iliad’s data-center joint venture. The bid targets the InvestAI Facility, a €20bn program intended to fund up to five gigafactories across the EU.

"A Scaleway-led AION consortium, with backing from Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and Mistral-adjacent partners, is positioning France as a single-country bidder against multi-state proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands."

"The AION consortium proposes a 200-megawatt facility centred on next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to more than 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s, the largest single-country bid disclosed since the European Commission opened its gigafactory selection process."

"The AION partner list, reads as a near-complete roll-call of the French AI stack. The named backers include GPU and chip-design specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, model-distribution platform Hugging Face, IT-services group Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Atos's compute subsidiary Eviden Bull, and developer-tooling company ZML."

"The consortium also draws operational support from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the existing AI Factory France EuroHPC project, with hosting through Opcore, Iliad's data-centre joint venture. The EU programme the bid sits inside is the InvestAI Facility, a €20bn envelope announced earlier this year to underwrite up to five gigafactories across the bloc."

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