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.
A consortium of French companies led by Iliad’s cloud subsidiary Scaleway has bid roughly $10bn to build one of the European Union’s planned AI gigafactories on French soil, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
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.
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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. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest in the initial sounding round, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland and Portugal among the member states co-financing the programme.
Telefonica is preparing the final Spanish bid; the formal call window was deferred from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to give consortia time to assemble multi-billion-euro capital structures.
On the disclosed numbers, AION’s $10bn capital commitment matches Iliad chair Xavier Niel’s longstanding framing that France needs to outspend, not match, on AI infrastructure if it intends to keep pace with the US and Chinese build-outs.
Iliad has invested €20bn in European infrastructure over the past decade, the Scaleway announcement notes; the AION figure puts roughly half that commitment into a single facility.
The 288,000-H100-equivalent target is positioned as the largest single GPU cluster outside the US hyperscalers and Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate footprint.
AION is not the only French-flagged AI infrastructure project the bid is competing with for capital. The MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW Paris-area campus, announced in 2025, is the parallel programme; Mistral is separately raising debt and equity for its own Sweden and Paris data-centre footprint.
AION’s stated differentiator is the open-source-and-public-private framing: GENCI and Inria participation positions the facility as part of the European public-research compute infrastructure, in contrast to the more commercially-driven MGX-Mistral programme.
The strategic context the announcement leans into is the ongoing pressure on European AI sovereignty.
GPU-as-a-service offerings from US providers have continued to dominate European frontier-AI procurement; OpenAI’s pause on its UK Stargate site over energy costs and regulatory uncertainty has produced a window in which a French-only proposition can credibly claim both available power capacity (France’s low-carbon grid) and a sovereign-software stack (SiPearl and Eviden hardware, Hugging Face and Kyutai software).
AION’s pitch is, on Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas’s framing, that ‘Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future.’
The Bloomberg report did not name the specific French site under consideration, the capital-stack breakdown between Iliad equity, EU grants, member-state co-financing and private debt, the construction timeline, or the formal procurement-decision date the Commission is now working to.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the body running the selection process, has not yet publicly named the bidder pool or set a final decision date. Telefonica’s Spanish bid and German and Dutch consortia are positioned as the most credible competing proposals.
The next visible proof point will be the EuroHPC JU’s shortlist announcement, expected before the end of the year on the formal-call cadence published earlier this year.
AION’s position alongside the wider Google-Blackstone $25bn TPU-cloud joint venture and the comparable US infrastructure announcements will become a public-market proxy for whether Europe’s gigafactory programme is ultimately operating at the same order of magnitude as the US private-sector build-out.
