EU Announces €10 bn Funding for Seven AI Gigafactories

EU AI gigafactories tech sovereignty EU funding AI compute capacity Henna Virkkunen

The European Commission has opened a tender for up to seven AI Gigafactories across the bloc. The programme is backed by €10 bn of public money from the EU and member states, with the expectation of drawing roughly €20 bn of private investment for a total of about €30 bn. Each facility must house at least 100,000 cutting‑edge AI chips and will be built alongside the existing network of 19 AI factories, more than doubling the continent’s AI compute capacity.

Applications are accepted until 12 November 2026, after which the winners will be announced in early 2027 and construction is slated to start later that year. Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s executive vice‑president for tech sovereignty, said that access to raw compute power is a “strategic necessity” for Europe as AI development accelerates. The EU has also signed letters of intent with U.S. chipmakers AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm to ensure hardware supply for the projects.

Entities: A. X K2 · AMD · EuroHPC Joint Undertaking · European Commission · Henna Virkkunen · KG Steel · Krafton · Nvidia · SK Telecom

Claims

What the coverage asserts, and how well corroborated each claim is across sources.

[● 2 SOURCES] A. X K2 is available on the open‑source platform Hugging Face. (SK Telecom)
[● 2 SOURCES] SK Telecom unveiled the A. X K2 AI foundation model with 688 billion parameters. (SK Telecom)
[● 2 SOURCES] SK Telecom plans to deploy demo versions of A. X K2 at KG Steel’s cold‑rolling line and KONEC’s casting processes in the second half of the year. (SK Telecom)
[○ 1 SOURCE] SK Telecom aims to build AI data centers with a total capacity of up to 15 GW, estimating a 1 GW center will cost about 70 trillion won as part of a 1,000‑trillion‑won AI data center investment plan. (SK Telecom)
[○ 1 SOURCE] Krafton released an audio foundation model called A. X K2 Raon‑Speech with 21 billion parameters, built on SK Telecom’s A. X K2, ranking first among Korean models and third among English models under (Krafton)
[● 2 SOURCES] Across 14 benchmarks, A. X K2 achieved an average performance gain of 32.2 percentage points over A. X K1. (SK Telecom)
[● 2 SOURCES] SK Telecom is collaborating with South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense to develop quantized models based on A. X K1 for deployment across Army, Navy, and Air Force units. (SK Telecom)
[● 2 SOURCES] A. X K2 showed a gain of about 83.9 percentage points in long‑context understanding benchmarks. (SK Telecom)
[● 3 SOURCES] The European Commission is offering €10 bn of public funding for up to seven AI Gigafactories.
[● 2 SOURCES] The new gigafactories will more than double the EU’s AI compute capacity, adding to an existing network of 19 AI factories.
[○ 1 SOURCE] Each AI Gigafactory must house at least 100,000 cutting‑edge AI chips.
[● 2 SOURCES] Winners of the tender will be announced in early 2027 and construction is expected to start later that year.