The European Union's plan for five AI gigafactories is slipping. The programme commits €20 billion, around $23 billion, to five large data centres, each designed for roughly one gigawatt of capacity and about 100,000 advanced chips. The bidding round, first set for May, has moved to July.
Funding and Falling Interest
Money is part of the difficulty. The EU provides €4.1 billion in subsidies, with the rest expected from member-state and private contributions, and only two of the five centres can be funded before 2028. Interest has thinned out as well, from around 70 companies at the start to roughly ten now expected to bid, with the Schwarz Group cooling on a long and complex tender and Telefonica weighing a smaller stake in any joint bid.
The Scale Gap
The contrast with private spending is hard to miss. SoftBank's commitment of up to €75 billion in France alone is more than three times the entire EU programme. Europe's ambition to host its own AI compute is running behind the private capital being deployed around it, much of it from outside the bloc.
For organisations that care where their AI runs, the delay is a signal worth reading. European public capacity is further off than the headline plans suggest, which keeps the question of domestic and trusted compute firmly open.
Source: Bloomberg, 2 June 2026.
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