The European Union's plan to build giant computing centres for artificial intelligence has reached its decisive phase. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the EU body for supercomputing, launched the call for "AI gigafactories" on 30 July 2026, and the first bid deadline passed on 12 November. Selection is expected in early 2027.

What the EU wants

AI gigafactories are meant to be much larger than the AI factories the EU has already funded at existing supercomputing centres. They should give European companies and researchers enough computing power to train large AI models at home, instead of renting it from US cloud providers.

Industry coverage describes the tender as aiming for up to seven sites with up to about 150 megawatts each. Large sums are involved, but only a small share is EU money; the rest is expected from member states and private investors. The European Commission's InvestAI initiative had earmarked €20 billion for gigafactories.

A deadline that moved

Most coverage gave 12 November 2026 as the bid deadline. The EU's tender portal, however, now shows a new deadline of 4 February 2027 for Lot 1, the medium-scale gigafactories. The deadline for Lot 2, the large-scale sites, was not changed.

Germany's contenders

Germany did not put forward one joint national bid in the first round of interest. Deutsche Telekom, the cloud provider Ionos and the IT arm of the Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl and Kaufland, each submitted their own expression of interest in June 2025. Bavaria entered a project called Blue Swan, with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and the real estate developer Investa Group in the consortium.

Ten countries signalled interest in hosting a site: Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Portugal and Spain.

The hard part: power

A site of 150 megawatts needs as much electricity as a mid-sized city. Grid connections, electricity prices and cooling are often the deciding factors, not the computers. This is where Nordic countries with cheap renewable power, and southern countries with available land and solar, may have an edge over Germany's crowded grids.

The same question is being asked in Canada, where Nova Scotia is debating a large AI data centre at Point Tupper. Whoever wins the EU gigafactories will have to show that they can bring power, water and local acceptance together.