More than 75 groups have expressed interest in hosting large-scale GPU clusters under the European Commission’s latest AI initiative.

The EU gigafactories project, announced in February, 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. Further technical specifications have not been disclosed.

The call for expressions of interest closed on 20 June, and the EU has now confirmed the number of potential suitors it had in the €20bn ($20.9bn) initiative.

“A total of 76 expressions of interest proposing to set up AI Gigafactories in 16 Member States across 60 different sites have been submitted,” the European Commission said this week.

As previously reported by DCD, groups from Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Czechia, France, and more have put their hats in the ring.

Respondents included data center operators, telecoms, power suppliers, as well as both European and global technology partners and financial investors.

“In their expressions of interest, the respondents foresee the acquisition of at least three million latest GPUs in total,” the commission said.

The call was put out to gauge interest in the project and map out a non-binding roster of potential candidates ahead of the official call for proposals.

The European Commission said it will soon enter into discussions with all the respondents to prepare the next steps of the gigafactory initiative.

The commission is then set to launch an official call in Q4 2025, via the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

“AI Gigafactories will be state-of-the-art, large-scale AI compute and data storage hubs, purpose-built to develop, train, and deploy next-generation AI models and applications at hyperscale, e.g. models with hundreds of trillions of parameters,” the commission said. “By integrating vast computing power, energy-efficient data centers, and AI-driven automation, these facilities will set new benchmarks for AI model training, inference, and deployment.”

French cloud player Scaleway, owned by Iliad, was one of the companies that had publicly confirmed its interest in the initiative. The company announced the AION consortium, which aims to deploy several next-generation GPU clusters, equivalent to over 288,000 current-generation Nvidia H100 GPUs and around 200MW of capacity.

The company said AION has also received support from GENCI and Inria, while partners that have expressed interest in supporting the consortium include VSORA, Kyutai, Sopra Steria, SiPearl, Artefact, Eviden Bull, ZML, Hugging Face, and H company.

“Europe can no longer afford to outsource the foundations of its AI future, and we welcome the initiative of the European authorities,” said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway.

“With AION, we are offering more than just infrastructure – we want to contribute to the independence, resilience, and leadership of the European ecosystem. This is a decisive time for our continent, and we call on all AI tech leaders in France and Europe to join us on this project.

Launched in 2018 and headquartered in Luxembourg, EuroHPC JU is a joint initiative between the EU, 35 European countries, and private partners to develop a supercomputing ecosystem in Europe. It has helped fund the deployment of nine supercomputers to date and multiple quantum computers.

Through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Commission previously announced plans for seven “AI factories” in December and will soon announce the next five, in a €10bn ($10.5bn) investment program.