From Factories to Gigafactories: How the EU Is Scaling AI

In the framework of Europe’s AI GigaFactories, AION will play a crucial role.

Scaleway leads this consortium, which has “expressed their support” from partners including Artefact, Eviden Bull, H Company, Hugging Face, Kyutai, SiPearl, Sopra Steria, VSORA, and VML. The Iliad cloud subsidiary intends to deliver, within this framework, 288,000 GPUs (H100-equivalent) for a capacity of 200 MW.

In the background, a call for expressions of interest issued by EuroHPC.

Early 2024: the EU drives the “AI Factories”

Since the start of 2024, the European joint venture has, among other missions, been tasked with supporting the development and operation of AI Factories. These are described as open ecosystems built around public supercomputers to develop generative AI models and applications. By “ecosystem,” one should particularly understand training data and human resources. The target audience includes both academia and industry.

This ambition materialized in September 2024 with the first call for expressions of interest. Its aim, broadly speaking: to establish AI Factories, potentially by acquiring or upgrading EuroHPC supercomputers.

In December 2024, the first winners were announced: seven projects in Germany, Spain, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg and Sweden. Five of them will deploy new supercomputers (see our article on this topic for more details).
Six additional bids were selected in March 2025. Their locations: Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovenia… and France, with the AI2F (AI Factory France) project. GENCI and Inria are co-leads. The epicenter will be at the TGCC (Très Grand Centre de calcul), in Bruyères-le-Châtel (Essonne), with the exaflop-scale Alice Recoque supercomputer, slated to be operational in 2026.

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Early 2025: the EU pushes forward… the “GigaFactories”

In the meantime, the European Commission urged a scaling-up toward AI GigaFactories. These are expected to house “more than 100,000 advanced chips” (H100-equivalent), versus 25,000 for the largest AI Factories. The EU estimates the budget needed to build and operate such a factory at between 3 and 5 billion euros. It also envisages an industrial, market-driven approach through public-private partnerships.

The AION consortium was formed in this context. For Scaleway, it builds on a partnership with GENCI and CNRS announced at VivaTech. The main objective: ensure interoperability between its clusters and the public infrastructure to foster project industrialization and address potential saturation.