European response to the AI race: the nuclear giant EDF joins a consortium to build the first "AI Gigafactory" in France.

France's state-owned energy company EDF officially joined the powerful technology and investment consortium AION, with the common goal of supporting France's candidacy within the European Union's official AI Gigafactory development program (AI Gigafactories). This alliance brings together leaders in energy, telecommunications, cloud technology, and private capital, including Orange, Capgemini, Artefact, Bull, iliad Group, Scaleway and Ardian investment fund

What are these “AI Gigafactories”?

Unlike standard data centers, AI Gigafactories represent massive hubs of next-generation supercomputing infrastructure. They build on the EU's existing initiative on "artificial intelligence factories", but with dramatically greater computing power, integrated resources, and full automation.

Companies emphasize that the future competitiveness of European economies will directly depend on their ability to access large, stable, competitive, and sovereign computing power. The challenge is both industrial and strategic: enabling European companies to train and manage their AI models under strictly controlled conditions of performance, costs, and sovereignty.

Nuclear energy as France's number one asset

The AION consortium explicitly states that France is a "strategic choice" to host this European mega-project, and as its first and most important comparative advantage they highlight its electric grid. Unlike American states that struggle with grid overload and the introduction of gas generators, France offers abundant, competitive, and low-carbon electricity thanks to its mix, which is largely composed of nuclear (about 70%) and hydroelectric plants.

The project is based on four pillars: top performance, strengthening European strategic autonomy through control of the value chain, open source, and ecological responsibility through controlling the ecological footprint.

"France has enormous assets for launching the development of AI infrastructure, including competitive and sovereign electricity with a low carbon share," said Beatris Bigoa, EDF's chief executive officer. "With this consortium we choose a collective ambition: to build a world-class European AI Gigafactory from France."

The Gigafactory initiative was launched by the European Union and the Joint Undertaking for European High-Performance Computing (EuroHPC JU), a public-private partnership established in 2018 with the goal of coordinating resources for developing a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe.

The news of EDF's entry into the AION consortium is the perfect capstone for understanding the political economy of artificial intelligence: AI is heavy and aggressive physical infrastructure that swallows enormous amounts of resources, especially electricity. The perfect answer to these increased needs is provided by nuclear power plants because they, from a small amount of nuclear material, produce enormous amounts of energy. And with EDF's entry into the game, France leverages its historic nuclear heritage and positions itself as one of the countries that could lead Europe in the race for data centers: France has one of the most stable, cheapest and greenest energy mixes, precisely due to its reliance on nuclear energy.

And on the other hand there is the problem: sooner or later we will find ourselves in a race for resources, and the competition will be incredibly wealthy and incredibly aggressive companies that build and develop data centers. 

S.A.