Nvidia and AMD are racing for a share of the European Commission’s €20 billion ($23.6B) fund to build AI Gigafactories across the EU. The EC just confirmed it received 76 expressions of interest across 16 member states, covering 60 potential sites.
The responses come from datacenter operators, telcos, and power companies aiming to build massive AI compute hubs to run models with hundreds of trillions of parameters. The Commission calls these “AI Gigafactories”—state-of-the-art, large-scale AI compute and data storage facilities.
EC Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen said this response "far exceeds our expectations" and shows Europe’s rising momentum in AI innovation. 
The new gigafactories will need at least three million next-gen GPUs, mainly from Nvidia and AMD, to power AI workloads. That’s a windfall for chipmakers.
The EC isn’t disclosing respondents’ names. But German hosting giant Ionos, Spanish telcos Telefónica and MasOrange, and datacenter infrastructure company Schneider Electric confirmed interest. Politicians in Denmark and Belgium are also pushing to host these facilities, though Denmark’s plans have faced criticism over huge electricity demands.
This initial round is just to map possible candidates. A formal call for proposals will drop by the end of 2025.
The EC’s €20B fund is part of its AI Continent Action Plan to put Europe on the global AI stage, currently lagging behind the US and China.
"An achievement that far exceeds our expectations and demonstrates Europe’s growing momentum and enthusiasm for innovation in AI."
— Henna Virkkunen, EC Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy
