"We are gathered today for what I hope will be a founding moment." From the outset, Thomas Reynaud, CEO of Iliad, set the tone at a press conference organized by Scaleway, the cloud subsidiary of Xavier Niel's group.
At this event just a stone's throw from the Élysée, Iliad, Ardian, Artefact, Bull, Capgemini, EDF, Orange and Scaleway announced the creation of a consortium named "AION" to build an AI gigafactory in France. The facility would be spread across several sites in France and is intended to eventually reach a computing capacity of one gigawatt. The first phase of the project sets an initial target of 100 megawatts, though the final details are still to be defined.
The grouping, which currently brings together 28 companies, aims to submit a French bid under the European AI gigafactories program — key infrastructures for running AI models. Last year, the European Commission had launched a call for expressions of interest to gauge the appetite of EU member states on the subject. A total of 76 expressions of interest, proposing to create AI gigafactories across 16 countries on 60 different sites, were received by the European executive. The next step is now to launch a tender, on which the "AION" consortium, flying the French flag, is looking to position itself from today.
A €10 billion project
By getting ahead of the process even before the tender opens, Iliad and the other players involved in the venture are no doubt hoping that this lobbying will help them bring to life a project valued at nearly €10 billion. In this context, Iliad has said it is prepared to commit an envelope of €4 billion.
Beyond major corporations such as Orange, EDF and Capgemini, the consortium includes well-known names from the French Tech scene, including Kyutai, the AI lab founded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé and Eric Schmidt; Hugging Face, the Franco-American unicorn behind an open-source AI model library; Quandela, one of France's leading players in quantum computing; and VSora, a supplier of AI-dedicated chips with ambitions to compete with Nvidia. Notably absent for now is Mistral AI, which earlier this year announced its intention to invest €1.2 billion in data centers in Sweden.
"Mistral AI would have a natural place in this consortium — discussions are underway," said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway. "I am pleased to see a Team France for AI taking shape. Today we are presenting a first batch of 28 companies, but we would be delighted to have other players alongside us to respond to the European Commission's tender," added Emmanuel Le Roux, CEO of Bull, the French giant in high-performance and quantum computing systems.
"We must not repeat the mistakes of the cloud"
With this "Team France", the objective is to cover the entire AI value chain, from supercomputers and microprocessors to data centers, AI models and cloud services. On the cloud front, the trauma remains raw for French tech players, as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have dominated the market, leaving only crumbs for players like OVHcloud and Scaleway. "We have one conviction: we must not repeat the mistakes of the cloud. We need to act, we need to change scale, we need to think outside the box," said Thomas Reynaud.
With this in mind, the CEO of Iliad believes this project could be a boon for boosting public procurement in AI, drawing a parallel between NASA and SpaceX. "We don't want subsidies — we want public procurement. The challenge is to secure the infrastructure to build the European AI of tomorrow," he confirmed, hoping to receive "several hundred million euros in public orders" from both the European Commission and the French government if the European tender is won. He added: "There won't be 27 gigafactories across the 27 EU countries. This is a historic opportunity to have a gigafactory in France. It would be a massive failure if it didn't happen, given our country's assets." In terms of assets, the executive refers above all to the abundant supply of decarbonized energy at an attractive price, and to the deep talent pool France has to offer.
A consortium to "reverse the trend" against the United States
With this consortium, the goal is to offer a high-performance infrastructure providing a genuinely credible alternative to American hyperscalers — one that is trustworthy, shielding users from US and Chinese extraterritorial laws, and open, with an open-source approach designed to foster research. And there is urgency, as AI adoption accelerates across the globe. "Today, 80% of global computing power is located on American soil," lamented Damien Lucas, who believes the "AION" consortium represents an "opportunity to reverse the trend."
The question of the financial resources needed to bring France and Europe back into the AI race now comes to the fore. In the United States, billions of dollars are pouring into AI, as evidenced by the $500 billion "Stargate" project led by SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia, and the "Terafab" project for which Elon Musk plans to invest at least $55 billion in chips for AI, robotics and space-based data centers. The project ultimately aims to produce chips capable of supporting between 100 and 200 gigawatts of computing power on Earth, and one terawatt in space — mind-boggling scales that raise serious questions about France and Europe's ability to compete.
Yet the "AION" consortium proves that there is a shared willingness among multiple players — sometimes rivals — to join forces and give themselves the means to bring ambitious projects to life on the Old Continent. The ball is now in Brussels' court to publish a long-awaited tender that could bring an AI gigafactory to life on French soil.
