Timeline
Europe's AI Gigafactories bet raises hard questions about whether public investment can deliver strategic autonomy or will end up subsidizing the very dependencies it seeks to overcome.
The council adopts a legislative act amending the EuroHPC Regulation (2021/1173) to legally permit the Union to invest in AI Gigafactories and quantum pillars. It formalizes the "majority ownership" rule for AI Gigafactory consortia and excludes "high-risk vendors" from the supply chains of these facilities. It creates the legal basis for the EU to own a share of the computing time, which is then redistributed to European startups.
The Commission, the European Investment Bank (EIB), and the European Investment Fund (EIF) sign a MoU to finalize the financial architecture for the Gigafactories. It mandates that the consortia must be European-led to ensure that the infrastructure itself remains a sovereign asset (even if the "engine" - the GPUs - is imported)
This letter calls on EU leaders to harness open source AI as a key enabler of Europe's digital sovereignty and propose a five-point plan.
The EU needs purposeful, open-source, and sustainable public AI—infrastructure that serves the public, not an AI-first race driven by dominant vendors.
Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen presented the sectoral strategy for AI adoption, addressing some specific concerns about "locked-in" partnerships. In her remarks, Virkkunen introduced the "Buy European AI" preference for public procurement. She argued that the EU should prioritize European open-source solutions.
EU commits €51.5B to digital leadership in its 2028-2034 budget. Our analysis examines whether the European Competitiveness Fund represents a fundamental shift from market-driven innovation to strategic public investment in digital infrastructure.
The AI Continent Action Plan needs a stronger vision of purposeful AI deployment if it wants to achieve more than just boost commercial AI development.
The Commission published The AI Continent Action Plana plan to coordinate the build-out of 13 "AI Factories" (smaller upgrades) and the new "AI Gigafactories" (hyperscale clusters). This document first defined the Gigafactory requirement: clusters of approximately 100,000 state-of-the-art AI chips.
At the AI Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a €200 billion AI investment target. This figure includes a €50 billion top-up mobilised through the InvestAI initiative, with €20 billion allocated to fund the first four to five AI Gigafactories.
