# European Commission opens bidding to build seven AI gigafactories > Source: > Published: 2026-07-30 10:37:32+00:00 The European Commission has opened the bidding to build up to seven artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories across the European Union, in a scheme it said would mobilise more than €30 billion in public and private investment. Brussels expects to put up to €10 billion of European and national funding into the projects. It is counting on that to attract at least €20 billion more from private investors. The sites are meant to give companies, start-ups, research centres, universities and public administrations the capacity to develop, train and run advanced AI models. European Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen described access to computing power on that scale as “a strategic necessity for Europe as AI development accelerates”. Consortia made up of companies, public bodies and investors are eligible to bid. Projects can sit in a single member state or be spread across several countries and will be assessed through a competitive procedure. Funding is to be channelled through the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). That body, together with 18 member states including Spain, will jointly buy access to the computing power of the sites eventually chosen. Two strands of support are on offer. The first carries European funding of up to €500 million per facility and the second up to €1 billion, released across two phases of development. The EC also said it had signed letters of intent with the US firms AMD, NVIDIA and Qualcomm to ease access to the hardware the consortia will need. It placed that step within the trade agreement struck between the EU and the United States. The call closes on November 12. The EC said it expected to take award decisions in early 2027 and to start construction of the first gigafactories the same year. Each gigafactory is expected to hold at least 100,000 advanced AI processors, roughly four times the capacity of the data centres now running in the bloc. An earlier non-binding call for expressions of interest drew 76 submissions covering 60 sites in 16 member states, far more than Brussels had anticipated. Member states have been signing up to the joint procurement agreement in recent weeks, with Warsaw confirming on July 28 that it had joined. The programme forms part of a broader drive for technological sovereignty, after the EC in June [unveiled a package of draft laws](https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/06/eu-moves-to-lock-us-tech-giants-out-of-sensitive-cloud-market/) aimed at reducing the bloc’s reliance on American cloud and chip suppliers. Under the EuroHPC regulation amended in January, entities from countries outside the scheme are barred from taking part in a gigafactory consortium. Virkkunen has said majority owners of the facilities should be European.