Europe’s battle for AI sovereignty is moving from rhetoric to concrete investment. Scaleway, the cloud services subsidiary of France’s iliad Group, has launched AION, a consortium designed to build what could become Europe’s first true AI gigafactory. The initiative answers a direct call from the European Commission and EuroHPC JU for stakeholders to step forward in shaping the continent’s AI infrastructure.
AION aims to deploy infrastructure equivalent to more than 288,000 of today’s most powerful GPUs (such as NVIDIA’s H100), translating to a projected 200 MW of compute capacity. The project draws on support from key European partners across the public and private sectors, and is part of a wider strategic ambition to develop AI infrastructure on sovereign, open, and scalable terms.
The announcement marks a decisive moment for Europe, which has often lagged behind the United States and China in both AI capability and the infrastructure required to support large-scale model training and inference. The urgency is not only technological, but geopolitical: as AI becomes central to economic and national security, control over compute is fast becoming a proxy for strategic autonomy.
Beyond infrastructure to ecosystem
AION is not just a hardware project. Scaleway has made clear that the initiative is grounded in three pillars, ambition, sovereignty, and openness. It builds on the company’s experience running France’s first private AI compute cluster since 2023, offering nearly 5,000 GPUs to startups and researchers. It also extends Scaleway’s earlier public-private partnerships, including its collaboration with GENCI and CNRS to establish a national AI continuum in France.
The consortium includes a broad spectrum of partners, ranging from cloud-native technology firms to chipmakers and open-source contributors. Early supporters include VSORA, Kyutai, Sopra Steria, SiPearl, Artefact, Eviden Bull, ZML, Hugging Face, and H company. The ambition is to reflect the diversity and technical excellence of the European AI ecosystem while pooling resources for collective advantage.
Hosting the new infrastructure in France will fall to Opcore, iliad’s dedicated data centre joint venture. France’s low-carbon electricity mix and reliable grid offer operational and environmental benefits, aligning the AION project with Europe’s broader climate targets.
Rebalancing AI power in Europe
The scale of the AION project signals Europe’s intention to reduce its reliance on US hyperscalers and vertically integrated AI platforms. While American and Chinese firms have raced ahead with gigawatt-scale deployments, European initiatives have largely focused on policy frameworks, funding rounds and isolated R&D efforts. AION represents a shift towards large-scale, tangible infrastructure capable of supporting foundation models, LLMs, and emerging forms of AI with high computational intensity.
Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway, described the launch as a pivotal step toward European AI independence. “Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future,” he said. “With AION, we are offering more than just infrastructure—we want to contribute to the independence, resilience, and leadership of the European ecosystem.”
Lucas’s message comes at a time when the ability to shape the AI landscape is increasingly determined by control over hardware and platforms. While regulations such as the EU AI Act define the rules of engagement, initiatives like AION aim to ensure Europe remains a participant, not just a referee, in the global AI race.
Whether AION can deliver on its full potential will depend on coordination, funding, and sustained collaboration across sectors. But in a landscape where access to compute defines who leads and who follows, the project marks a rare and necessary act of long-term thinking. For Europe’s AI ambitions to move beyond white papers and policy summits, initiatives like AION may well prove essential.
