The AION consortium led by Scaleway, supported by Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and close partners Mistral, places France as a single country applicant against multi-regional proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
A consortium of French companies led by Iliad’s cloud subsidiary Scaleway has bid around $10bn to build one of the European Union’s planned AI hubs on French soil, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The AION consortium is proposing a 200-megawatt facility focused on next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to more than 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s, the largest single-country bid disclosed since the European Commission opened its gigafactory selection process.
List of AION partners, it reads like an almost perfect call to the French AI stack. Named sponsors include GPU and chip-design specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, model distribution platform Hugging Face, IT-services group Sopra Steria, consultant Artefact, Atos computer subsidiary Eviden Bull, and engineer’s tools company ZML.
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The consortium also receives operational support from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the existing AI Factory France EuroHPC project, hosted by Opcore, Iliad’s data-centre joint venture.
The EU’s internal bid program is the InvestAI Facility, €20bn envelope it was announced earlier this year that there will be under five gigafactories across the bloc. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest in the first round, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland and Portugal are among the member countries that are financing the program.
Telefonica i preparing for Spain’s final bid; the official call window has been pushed back from late 2025 until the first half of 2026 giving consortia time to assemble large multi-billion euro structures.
In the figures disclosed, AION’s $10bn financial commitment is consistent with Iliad chairman Xavier Niel’s outline that France needs to invest, not unlike, in AI infrastructure if it aims to keep pace with the US and China.
Iliad has invested €20bn in European infrastructure over the past decade, Scaleway’s announcement notes; the AION figure puts about half of that commitment in one place.
The 288,000-H100-sized target is set to be the largest single GPU cluster outside of US hyperscalers and the Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate footprint.
AION is not the only French flagged AI infrastructure project that is competing for funding. MGX-Bpifrance-Nvidia-Mistral 1.4GW Paris-area campusannounced in 2025, is a parallel program; Mistral is separately raising debt and equity for its Swedish and Paris data centers.
AION’s stated difference is its open-source and public-private framework: The participation of GENCI and Inria positions the institute as part of the European public research computing infrastructure, unlike the commercially driven MGX-Mistral program.
The strategic context on which the announcement rests is the continued pressure on Europe’s AI sovereignty.
GPU-as-a-service offerings from US providers they have continued to dominate European frontier-AI procurement; A break from OpenAI on its UK Stargate site in addition to energy costs and regulatory uncertainty have produced a window where only the French proposal can credibly claim the energy available for both the available energy (the French low carbon grid) and the independent software stack (SiPearl and Eviden hardware, Hugging Face and Kyutai software).
AION’s pitch is, in the formulation of Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas, that ‘Europe can no longer afford the foundations of its AI future.’
The Bloomberg report did not reveal the specific French site being considered, the breakdown of the bulk of the money between Iliad equity, EU grants, co-financing and private debt, the construction timeline, or the official date of the purchase decision the Commission is currently working on.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the body conducting the selection process, has not publicly named the pool of bidders or set a deadline for a decision. Spain’s Telefonica bid and the German and Dutch consortia are positioned as the most credible competing proposals.
The next point of tangible evidence will be the announcement of the EuroHPC JU shortlist, which is expected before the end of the year in the official cadence published earlier this year.
AION location next to a wide area Google-Blackstone $25bn TPU-cloud joint venture and similar US infrastructure announcements will be a proxy for the public market as to whether the European gigafactory system ultimately works on the same scale as US private sector construction.
