The European Union announced a plan to spend 10 billion euros, or about $11.4 billion, on seven new AI gigafactories. The European Commission shared the details on Thursday.
Officials say the goal is to help Europe close the gap with the United States and China in artificial intelligence. The Commission hopes the public funding will attract another 20 billion euros, or roughly $22.8 billion, from private investors.
Henna Virkkunen is the Commission's executive vice president for tech sovereignty. She said access to large-scale computing power is a strategic necessity as AI development speeds up worldwide.
Why Europe Wants Tech Independence
European leaders have grown concerned about depending on technology built outside the continent. They say foreign-made AI tools could be used against European interests.
Tensions with the US over tech rules and China's limits on mineral exports have added pressure. Both issues have pushed EU leaders to move faster on their own AI infrastructure.
Companies can now bid for contracts to build the seven gigafactories. Each site is planned to hold at least 100,000 advanced AI chips.
That would make the new facilities about four times more powerful than data centers already running in the EU.
The Current Gap With the US and China
The EU currently runs a network of 19 AI data centers spread from Finland to Spain. Once the seven gigafactories are built, the bloc's total computing power will more than double.
A 2025 report from the US Federal Reserve found that Europe trails far behind the US and China in key AI areas. China has large electrical capacity for data centers, while the US receives most of the world's private AI investment.
Europe does not manufacture many of the parts needed for data centers. Electricity costs in the EU can run two to three times higher than in the US or China, according to a Commission report from June.
That report warned that European businesses will keep relying on US AI providers unless the situation changes. It also noted that the EU's top five cloud service providers are all American companies.
France's Mistral runs one of the largest AI data centers in Europe at its Paris campus. Mistral makes the Le Chat chatbot but has not kept pace with companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
French President Emmanuel Macron has spoken publicly about Europe's lack of homegrown AI companies. Many people across the continent also worry about how AI could affect jobs and privacy.
The Commission said AI products built using the new data centers will follow EU rules on data protection, safety and ethics.
In June, 40 mayors from cities around the world signed an agreement to limit the impact of AI data center construction on natural resources and energy prices, from Phoenix to Melbourne.
