EuroHPC opened the AI Gigafactories call for tenders on 30 July, with submissions closing on 12 November 2026, selection expected in early 2027, and funding for up to seven sites spread across at least seven member states 1. No consortium and no location has been named. The call is explicit about what the public money buys: it "will act as an anchor customer, significantly de-risking the significant capital required and helping to unlock expected Total private investment of more than 20 billion euros across the EU" 2.
Anchor-customer procurement commits the state to buying output rather than to writing rules, so the public purse absorbs demand risk that a private investor would otherwise have to price into the build. Its known failure mode is that it rewards whatever can be delivered fastest, and the fastest route to seven very large AI sites runs through the same accelerator supplier the Luxembourg machine bought from nine days earlier. The published call does not say whether the evaluation weights European content at all.
When the EUR 4.12bn programme was confirmed in June, the Commission's executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen said majority owners of AI Gigafactories should come from Europe, and we wrote then that the call would be the first test of whether that standard survives contact with a market in which no European AI accelerator exists . That test has now opened with a date on it. Brussels is not pretending to be self-sufficient in the meantime, having committed in June to at least $40bn of American AI chips under the Pax Silica arrangement .
The useful measure on 12 November will not be the headline capital figure. It will be how many consortia bid, how many member states they cover against the floor of seven, and how much of the capital equipment those bids propose to procure inside the EU.
