A group of French companies has joined Iliad’s AI & data center consortium to bid for European Union funding.

Investment firm Ardian, consulting company Artefact, supercomputing stalwart Bull, Capgemini, energy company EDF, and telco Orange have teamed up with Iliad and Scaleway to join the AION consortium to launch what the group called an “ambitious” bid for France under the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative.

Announced in February 2025, the EU gigafactories project will see three to five supercomputing clusters built across the continent, each equipped with 100,000 AI chips for training the latest and most complex models.

In October, the EU said that it had received 76 grant applications to set up data centers across 16 of its Member States. Final decisions on which bids will be chosen are yet to be made.

One of those companies was Iliad-owned French cloud provider Scaleway, which at the time said it aimed to deploy several next-generation GPU clusters, equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100 GPUs and around 200MW of capacity.

The consortium said AION will be able to leverage the “complementary strengths” of a wide spectrum of players’ entire value chain, including supercomputers, energy, cloud platforms, and data center infrastructure.

Benoît Gaillochet, head of infrastructure Europe at Ardian, said: “It’s time to build a European AI ecosystem together, based on world-class European infrastructure and underpinned by France’s outstanding low-carbon energy capabilities. United by this ambition, we’re delighted to be teaming up with our friends at the Iliad Group and the Orange group to join and steer the AION consortium, which will also be supported by other major industrial and tech players. Alongside our partners, we’re proud to be putting our industrial and financial expertise to the service of developing sustainable and resilient AI computing capacity on a large scale.”

Emmanuel Le Roux, CEO of Bull, added: “This initiative is particularly important for Bull in its capacity as the only player capable of guaranteeing a mostly European supply chain for AI, cloud, and supercomputer infrastructure. We see AION as a natural extension of our strategic pathway, bringing additional computing capabilities dedicated to simulation and AI, developing new AI-optimized hardware technologies, and deploying our software platform and data science services to enable the production of industrial AI use cases.”

Le Roux added: “Through AION, we’re reaffirming our commitment to strengthening Europe’s ability to develop and operate next- generation AI and cloud infrastructure, while laying the foundations for a more resilient, competitive, and independent technology ecosystem.”