An AION consortium led by Scaleway, with support from Iliad, GENCI, Inria, Eviden, SiPearl, Hugging Face, and Mistral-adjacent partners, is making a bid for France to stand as a single-country candidate against multi-state proposals from Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
A consortium of French companies led by Iliad’s cloud subsidiary Scaleway has bid approximately $10bn to establish one of the EU’s planned AI gigafactories in France, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The AION consortium suggests a 200-megawatt facility centered on next-generation GPU clusters equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100s, marking the largest single-country bid revealed since the European Commission started its gigafactory selection process.
The AION partner list includes nearly all of the French AI stack. Named backers are GPU and chip-design specialists VSORA and SiPearl, model labs Kyutai and H Company, model-distribution platform Hugging Face, IT-services group Sopra Steria, consultancy Artefact, Atos’s computing subsidiary Eviden Bull, and developer-tooling company ZML.
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The consortium also draws operational support from GENCI and Inria, co-leaders of the AI Factory France EuroHPC project, with hosting provided by Opcore, Iliad’s data-centre joint venture.
The EU programme the bid is part of is the InvestAI Facility, a €20bn initiative announced earlier this year meant to fund up to five gigafactories across Europe. The European Commission received 76 expressions of interest in the first round, with Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and Portugal among the countries co-financing the programme.
Telefonica is preparing the final Spanish bid; the official call window was pushed from late 2025 to the first half of 2026 to give consortia time to organize multi-billion-euro funding structures.
Based on the disclosed figures, AION’s $10bn capital investment aligns with Iliad chair Xavier Niel’s long-standing view that France needs to outspend, not just match, other countries in AI infrastructure to keep pace with the US and China.
Iliad has invested €20bn in European infrastructure over the past decade, noted in the Scaleway announcement; the AION figure represents nearly half of that commitment concentrated into a single facility.
The target of 288,000-H100-equivalents is pitched as the largest single GPU cluster outside the US hyperscalers and Microsoft-OpenAI Stargate network.
AION is not the only France-based AI infrastructure project vying for investment. <a href="https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/mgx-bpifrance-n