The AI Gigafactories call is now open.

Today, we launched a call for tenders to establish up to 7 AI Gigafactories across Europe, boosting Europe’s computing capacity and unlocking more than €30 billion in investment.

I am pleased to see Member States, industry, and the Commission coming together to build these facilities, which are key to strengthening our technological sovereignty.

This is a milestone for Europe in becoming an AI Continent.

https://link.europa.eu/qGDhv3

@HennaVirkkunen Why?

@HennaVirkkunen of all the things to burn €30 billion on, you chose an objective economic bubble that hastens global warming... and you're celebrating this?

@HennaVirkkunen

@HennaVirkkunen

Respectfully, please don't do this.

GenAI/LLM is a technological dead end like asbestos or blockchain. It will accelerate the climate crisis, deprive communities of energy and deskill the people who use it, causing far more damage than utility. The damage will be long-lasting, people in the future will curse us for going down this path.

The money would be far better spent on other areas of data sovereignty.

@HennaVirkkunen Which social-practical usage do AI gigafactories have - do they lower the cost of living for EU citizens? Nope, they do the complete opposite by being energy hungry blackholes bumping up energy and water prices.

Do they create jobs? Nope, they destroy more jobs and create an issue a future generation will suffer. Since CEOs replace entry level jobs with AI, there will be no senior workers when Gen X leaves the job market

Do they create profit? Only for shell firms and tax fraud

@HennaVirkkunen@ec.social-network.europa.eu
This is EXACTLY what people DON'T want.
How can you be so out of touch?
People vastly hate AI.
Where an AI datacenter is made, water is wasted, electricity prices go up.
Not to mention the awful possibility of forests being cut down for it.

@HennaVirkkunen@ec.social-network.europa.eu
Not to mention the fact that this will make computer hardware components prices go further up, don't you realize that people are struggling to get their hands on computer parts for personal use because of ai datacenter?
We should be able to afford our own hardware, not rent cloud systems that require a connection to work.
This is horrible for so many reasons.

@HennaVirkkunen I don't want Europe to become an AI continent.

@HennaVirkkunen seriously, right in the middle of the worst heatwaves SO FAR, with an upcoming even bleaker future, with half of Europe LITERALLY ON FIRE, the EU is going to donate billions to some of most climate-impacting and useless industries? Where did any of you get the idea that that was a smart thing to do?

How about you invest that money into gaining independence from the oil industry, given how impactful that has been already even in purely financial terms?

https://www.euronews.com/2026/05/30/clean-energy-saved-eu-51-billion-in-2025-by-cutting-fossil-fuel-imports-as-solar-leads-the

@HennaVirkkunen You are an idiot.

@HennaVirkkunen

Who told you, that there is a "need" for Europe to "become an AI continent"? Google? Microsoft? Nvidia? CEO ranks with no clue, what they are talking about? Investors? Lobbyists?

Europe has to become
- CO2 emissions neutral
- more social
- more educated

I recommend you to study diverse papers that are not promoted by interested parties, but written by scientists.

Neutral networks are NOT Turing complete - and as such there is no singularity in view, regardless what Sam 1/

@HennaVirkkunen

Altman is dreaming of

AI in the workplace may stipulate major social problems regarding workforce

AI INCREASES climate problems.

Get your things done!!!

@danielquinn @HennaVirkkunen Good thing is that it's European project, so by the time they are ready to start with building, AI bubble will already burst

@engineer @danielquinn @HennaVirkkunen Historically, that has not prevented the projects with signed contracts from going forward. A lot of (EU-funded) Blockchain/Web3/NFT research projects were carried out long after their valuations had collapsed.

@HennaVirkkunen

So, just to confirm: you observed the US become dominated by billionaires and exploitative companies who are throwing trillions or dollars at technology that provides marginal (at best) benefits to society and entrenches their power, and your reaction was 'the EU should do that too!'?

For comparison, the amount that you're burning on this is more than twice as much as you'd need for the EU to build a competitive range of memory-safe sovereign CPUs from microcontroller up to server class devices and port most open-source software to run on them. This would reduce the attack surface for all EU infrastructure significantly and provide strong sovereignty guarantees.

Can you share how you did a cost-benefit calculation and decided that chasing a big-tech fad was the best return on investment for the bloc?

@HennaVirkkunen do you hear yourself

@HennaVirkkunen Give it a few years to see if it's real, first, eh? - you wouldn't want to end up blowing vast quantities of public money on something like blockchain or NFTs, now, would you.

@HennaVirkkunen it's good to see Europe investing in digital sovereignty.

@HennaVirkkunen

Right, so we don't have enough water to cool our existing nuclear power plants or irrigate fields that produce our food, so I'm sure this is a brilliant idea!

Just make sure to put them somewhere out of reach from the fires. (We are probably running out of water to fight those effectively too, but as long as we can create AI slop, we'll be fine?)

Please reconsider, @HennaVirkkunen - the value really isn't there.

@david_chisnall @HennaVirkkunen

on the other hand, 30 billion , over a few years, for capex, is not that much money for the EU
right ?

and IF you accept that machine learning is AI, THEN alpha fold is a clear example of great benefit to society

also, I think it is true that for the last 200 years, *every new promising tech, canals, railroads, etc, has seen a huge boom bust in CAPEX

@failedLyndonLaRouchite @HennaVirkkunen

It's not a huge amount in comparison to the total budget, it's an enormous amount in comparison to most other individual projects that the EU is investing in.