The European Commission announced on 30 July 2026 a plan to invest €10 billion (about US$11.4 billion) to build seven artificial-intelligence 'gigafactories', in a bid to close the gap with the United States and China on AI compute.
Each facility is planned to be equipped with at least 100,000 advanced AI chips and to deliver performance roughly four times that of the EU's current operational data centres. Once the seven factories are running, the EU's AI computing capacity is expected to more than double. Public funding is projected to crowd in an additional €20 billion (about US$22.8 billion) of private investment.
The Commission said it has signed letters of intent with AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm to secure access to the hardware required for the AI gigafactories, signalling a coordinated industrial policy push into sovereign AI infrastructure.
The initiative forms part of a broader European effort to reduce dependence on non-EU compute and to support AI adoption across industry, public services and research.
Source: European Commission, 30 July 2026.
