The French utility has joined an alliance with tech companies Artefact, Bull and Capgemini, telecommunications companies the iliad Group, its data centre arm Scaleway, and Orange, and private equity firm Ardian to combine their expertise within the AION consortium to support the French application within the framework of the European AI Gigafactories programme.
The future competitiveness of European economies will depend directly on their ability to access massive, available, competitive, and sovereign computing power, the companies said. “The challenge is industrial, economic, and strategic: enabling European companies to train, deploy, and operate their AI models under controlled conditions of performance, cost, and sovereignty. This is the ambition of the project led by the AION consortium.”
AION was launched in June 2025 by European cloud and AI provider Scaleway, bringing together public, private, and academic partners to support the development of sovereign, high-performance infrastructure for AI in Europe in response to an invitation for expressions of interest in contributing to the future development of AI Gigafactories in the European Union. The invitation was issued by the European Union and EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners set up in 2018 to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem.
AI Gigafactories will be high-capacity AI infrastructure hubs that build on the existing EU AI Factories initiative – with significantly greater compute power, integrated data resources, and automation.
France would be a “strategic choice” to host a European AI Gigafactory, the companies said, with unique advantages including “abundant, competitive, sovereign, and low-carbon electricity thanks to its mix mainly composed of nuclear and hydroelectric power, robust digital infrastructure and recognised expertise across the entire value chain, particularly in data centres, cloud computing and high-performance computing”.
The AION consortium is based on four fundamental pillars:
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Performance: deploying a world-class AI infrastructure to serve the European economy;
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Trust: strengthening European strategic autonomy through complete control of the AI value chain with the support of sovereign actors;
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Openness: promoting the use of open source technologies and partnerships serving the European ecosystem;
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Responsibility: to develop AI to serve research, businesses and European citizens with particular attention to controlling its environmental footprint.
Béatrice Bigois, Group Executive Director in charge of EDF’s Customers, Services and Territories division, said France has major assets to drive the development of AI infrastructure, including competitive, sovereign and low-carbon electricity. “With this consortium, we are choosing a collective ambition: to build a world-class European AI Gigafactory from France. EDF intends to fully contribute to this strategic dynamic for Europe,” she said.
