France's AION Consortium Places $10B Bid for EU AI Gigafactory — 288,000 H100s, 1GW Target
The AION consortium has formally bid for one of five EU AI gigafactories under the European Commission’s InvestAI Facility, the €20 billion envelope launched in December 2025 to fund frontier compute infrastructure across the bloc.
The bid is $10 billion (€8.6B), the largest single-country proposal disclosed since the Commission opened its gigafactory selection process. Seventy-six expressions of interest arrived in the initial sounding round; AION is competing against multi-state coalitions led by Telefonica (Spain), Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy.
The facility
The AION proposal centres on a 200MW initial phase, with a stated ambition to reach 1GW — which Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas says would effectively double France’s existing compute capacity. The core GPU cluster would be equivalent to over 288,000 Nvidia H100s in current-generation terms, placing it outside the US hyperscaler tier but above anything Europe has built.
EDF’s role is structural: France’s state utility is opening former industrial sites with direct grid connections to accelerate power-supply timelines. The country’s nuclear and hydroelectric energy mix gives AION a low-carbon electricity argument that Germany or the Netherlands cannot easily replicate on the same timeline.
The consortium
Eight anchor companies form the core: Iliad (with €4B committed directly through Scaleway), EDF, Capgemini, Orange, Ardian (infrastructure PE), Artefact, Bull (Atos compute subsidiary), and Scaleway. Around them sits a wider ecosystem — Hugging Face, SiPearl, VSORA (chip design), Kyutai, H Company, GENCI, Inria, Sopra Steria, Schneider Electric, Nokia, and Crédit Agricole.
The partner list is a deliberate signal. AION is not pitching as a GPU farm but as an integrated AI value chain, from chip design (SiPearl builds the European Rhea processor) to model labs (Kyutai, H Company) to model-distribution platforms (Hugging Face). The open-source and public-private framing is the stated differentiator against the Blackstone-Google and CoreWeave-style commercial compute bids in the US.
Financing
Ardian infrastructure head Benoît Gaillochet confirmed the funding would combine private investors, bank lending, and EU grant money. Iliad’s €4B commitment is the single largest anchor, representing roughly half of founder Xavier Niel’s decade-long €20B European infrastructure investment programme channelled into one facility.
The €10B total would consume roughly half of the InvestAI envelope across just one of five planned gigafactories — an aggressive positioning move as much as a capital plan. The Commission has not set a final decision date.
What comes next
Telefonica’s Spanish bid is preparing its final submission. The formal call window was deferred from late 2025 to H1 2026 to give consortia time to assemble multi-billion-euro capital structures. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will evaluate competing submissions before the Commission makes awards.
AION’s case rests on three claims: France’s low-carbon power surplus (nuclear and hydro), an existing deep-tech supply chain covering chips through deployment, and sovereign positioning for EU governments unwilling to run sensitive workloads on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.