In the run-up to the AI Gigafactories call for proposals, the AION consortium is getting into battle formation.
Seven of its members, gathered this week in Paris, sent a clear message.
What is this call for proposals?
Land, budget, chip suppliers, targeted power… AION is offering few details for the moment. The call for proposals has not yet been published. The consortium hopes to see it “in the coming weeks or the coming months.”
The call will originate from the European Commission. The joint venture EuroHPC has sketched out the main lines in an expression of interest launched in April 2025. The “AI mega-factories” are expected to house “more than 100,000 advanced chips,” compared with 25,000 for the largest AI Factories that Brussels had initially promoted.
Who makes up the consortium AION?
AION signaled itself shortly after the publication of this expression of interest. Scaleway stood at the forefront. Nine companies had “expressed their support”: Artefact, Bull, H Company, Hugging Face, Kyutai, SiPearl, Sopra Steria, VSORA (RISC-V chips) and VML (consulting firm).
They are now 28, at the crossroads of public and private spheres. The Iliad group has joined, along with its subsidiaries Kyutai and Scaleway. It is also present via OpCore, a data center operator it owns in equal parts with the investment company InfraVia.
In the public sphere, Inria and GENCI are on board. As well as PariSanté Campus (a health digital cluster whose origins include Inserm, Inria, the Health Digital Agency, the Health Data Hub and Université PSL).
Capgemini, EDF, Schneider Electric and Orange are also part of the initiative. Bouygues is involved via its subsidiary Equans (energy and services).
AION also encompasses another digital health innovation ecosystem: Future4Care, born from a partnership among Sanofi, Generali, Capgemini and Orange.
LightOn and Quandela also answered the call. As did Crédit Agricole and the private equity firm Ardian, also represented through its subsidiary
In this “team France,” as some members call it, four companies have bases outside France: Nokia (Finland), Multiverse Computing (Spain), Verne (UK) and Hugging Face (US).
What is the budget forecast?
Based on current market costs, the project could involve around €10 billion in investments, according to Benoît Guillochet, Head of Infrastructure Europe at Ardian. Iliad has stated it is prepared to mobilize €4 billion.
“Economic rivalries should not prevent us from facing AI together,” declares the respective executive. Vincent Luciani echoes him. The scale of what will be invested this year in the United States is around $700 billion, notes the executive chairman of Artefact. “Obviously we must pool our forces [to secure volumes and favorable pricing],” he adds.
Absent large-scale players, one should at least pursue a project at scale to deliver tokens in massive quantities and at the best possible cost, contends Jérôme Berger, Orange’s Director of Strategy.
Étienne Grass, Chief AI Officer of Capgemini Invent, emphasizes the token price as a major competitive lever. Last week, he notes, the Atlanta Federal Reserve published an estimate of average token expenditure by American employees. In firms with more than 250 employees, it runs about $3,200 per year. “That’s 2% of payroll,” he observes, confident that this figure will “rise to around 10-15%.”
Vincent Luciani confirms: with the rise of agentic architectures, the volume of tokens per person consumed at Artefact has surged tenfold in the last three months. “It’s roughly the same for many of our clients,” he notes. And he concludes that there is an urgent need to “secure capacity now: in a few months or a few years, it won’t be available or it will be very expensive.”
What are the expectations?
The call for expressions of interest suggests there will likely be two orders for AI Gigafactories. One from Europe and one from the host state.
AION aims, initially, for “several hundreds of millions of euros” of public procurement. The consortium has also organized to mobilize private demand, assures Damien Lucas. The objective: secure at least a substantial portion of the first tranche, which will be around 100 MW, according to Scaleway’s CEO. The gigawatt “is probably the ambition we can have,” subject to the European Commission’s forthcoming publication.
Some AION member companies will also become customers. Bull will be among them. “We will contribute by taking a portion offtake,” confirms its CEO Emmanuel Le Roux. Put differently: “We will use the Gigafactory’s resources to deploy use cases for our clients.”
What about land and computing resources?
In 2025, France introduced a fast-track procedure for the rapid connection of data centers to the electrical grid. One beneficiary is the OpCore-InfraVia project in Seine-et-Marne, at the site of the former EDF Montereau plant.
Asked about the possibility of siting the AI Gigafactory there, Damien Lucas stresses that it is “not reasonable to put everything on a single site,” particularly for resilience considerations.
As for compute resource suppliers, AION remains open, especially while awaiting the call for proposals. “Today there is no exclusivity. We leave all options open,” sums up Damien Lucas.
On this front, SiPearl and VSORA will likely help diversify suppliers. Quandela as well. In an AI Gigafactory, not all power will be dedicated to AI; there will be megawatts of HPC for simulation, for CPUs (including inference; Scaleway announced last year a collaboration with Fujitsu)… and for quantum technologies.
For Jérôme Berger, Quandela’s involvement underscores, among other sovereignty concerns, the short-term objective of keeping quantum simulations on GPUs in Europe. Many startups are carrying out these tasks today in the United States, he notes.
“We have two French startups supplying processors,” observes Étienne Grass. “The Gigafactory’s role will also be to give these technologies mass-market access. If we do not give our startups the chance to scale, Europe will never have an AMD, an Intel or an NVIDIA, and we will never be fully sovereign.”
On the data center front, Ardian notes that Verne, which initially developed its fleet in Northern Europe, now has a project in France “that will be part of the usable capacities.”
Discussions are underway with Mistral AI, conspicuously absent from the AI consortium.
