---
title: Inside Europe's €30bn Progress on AI Sovereignty
description: The European Commission has opened tenders for up to seven AI Gigafactories, the latest and largest step in a build-out that has already put 19 AI Factories ...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-08-07T16:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-11-01T09:47:54.409Z
canonical: https://www.richmanmagazine.com/article/inside-europe-s-30bn-progress-on-ai-sovereignty
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-futuristic-robotic-hand-touching-a-digital-network-on-a-blue-8386437.jpg
categories: Innovation
region: Europe
publication: Rich Man Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

The European Commission opened its call for tenders for up to seven AI Gigafactories this week, the latest and largest step in a build-out of European computing power that has been under way, with growing speed, for two years. The scale of the ambition is considerable: up to €10bn in EU and national public funding, expected to draw at least €20bn more in private investment, for facilities each housing more than 100,000 advanced AI processors, built specifically to train and run the next generation of large-scale AI models on European soil, under European ownership and European standards for data protection, security and ethics.

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, called the opening of the call a milestone in the bloc's ambition to become the AI Continent, and described access to that scale of computing power as 'a strategic necessity for Europe' as AI development accelerates. The description is not overstatement. This is, by the Commission's own account, the largest public-private partnership in the world dedicated to the development of trustworthy AI.

## A programme with a track record already

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