AI gigafactory
The EU's term for a very large publicly co-funded site for training and running AI models.
An AI gigafactory, in European Commission usage, is a data centre big enough to train frontier-scale models, built with a mix of public and private money and open to startups, small firms, universities and public bodies rather than a single owner. The name borrows deliberately from battery gigafactories.
In July 2026 the Commission opened bidding for up to seven of them, with up to 10 billion euros in EU and national funding intended to attract 20 billion more from private investors. Applications close in November 2026 and construction is planned from 2027. For scale, US tech companies plan to spend more than 600 billion dollars on data centres in 2026 alone.