EU Rattles Its Purse And AI Datacenter Builders Come Running

It's pork barrel time in Europe for Nvidia (and possibly AMD) as corporations bid for a slice of the €20 billion ($23.6 billion) fund to build proposed AI Gigafactories to advance the EU's AI credentials.

The European Commission (EC) says it has received an "overwhelming response" to its Call for Expression of Interest in building AI Gigafactories, as well there might be when someone is waving an open check book around.

Some 76 expressions of interest to set up AI Gigafactories in 16 EU member states involving 60 different sites were submitted, the EC confirms. Respondents include global and European orgs representing datacenter operators, telecoms providers and power companies.

For those not aware, AI Gigafactories are described as "state-of-the-art, large-scale AI compute and data storage hubs," basically oversized bit barns purpose built for the development of AI models and applications at scale – meaning models with hundreds of trillions of parameters.

Speaking at a press conference, EC Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy Henna Virkkunen called it "an achievement that far exceeds our expectations and demonstrates Europe's growing momentum and enthusiasm for innovation in AI."

Key winners from this largesse are set to be the GPU makers; the new facilities will require at least three million of the latest generation of these accelerators for AI processing, the EC said. Enough to keep Nvidia chief Jensen Huang in fancy leather jackets for some time to come.

The goal of investment is for Europe to position itself as a global powerhouse in artificial intelligence. Currently the region is lagging behind the US and China in the AI model development arms race, but somewhere ahead of the Cook Islands.

However, these submissions are not formal applications. Instead, they are to inform the European Commission and EU member states in mapping out the range of potential candidates available to establish AI Gigafactory facilities across the bloc, with an official call for proposals planned for the end of 2025.

Business confidentiality prevents the EC from disclosing the identity of any of the respondents, but we found that German hosting firm Ionos submitted an expression of interest in the construction and operation of an AI Gigafactory, while telcos Telefónica and MasOrange are hoping to do the same in Spain.

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Datacenter infrastructure biz Schneider Electric also recently said it saw an opportunity in the EC's AI Continent Action Plan, the overarching initiative to set up at least 13 AI factories in addition to the AI gigafactories.

Politicians in Denmark are keen on their country hosting one of the bloated bit barns, but this has proved controversial because of the power consumption such a site would involve, potentially putting pressure on the Danish electricity grid.

Belgium is also understood to have proposals for an AI Gigafactory, with potential sites at Charleroi or Zellik, just outside Brussels. ®