Brussels Opens €30 B Tender for Seven AI “Gigafactories”

Europe’s scramble for ‘compute sovereignty’ echoes earlier bids for strategic autonomy—Galileo (1999-2016) in navigation and Euratom’s JET (1983) in fusion—large, state-backed tech infrastructures meant to close perceived dependency gaps with the U.S. and Asia. Like those projects, the gigafactories sit at the intersection of industrial policy, security anxiety and market lag: the EU supplies only ~3 % of leading-edge chips and pays roughly double the U.S. price for industrial electricity, so it substitutes scale-up subsidies for missing supply chains. Yet history warns that hardware alone rarely secures leadership: Europe built Ariane rockets but ceded launch services to SpaceX; Galileo went operational but still leans on U.S. GPS adoption. Over a century-long arc, the tender signals a world where raw computing capacity is treated like steel or oil in the 20th-century geopolitics—an asset states mobilise directly. Whether it reshapes that landscape will hinge less on the €30 B headline than on Europe’s ability to nurture indigenous chip designs, cheap renewable power and demand-side ecosystems; without those, the gigafactories risk becoming costly monuments to mid-2020s technological anxiety rather than engines of lasting sovereignty.