The Sovereign Compute SPV
Who will control Europe’s €30 billion AI Gigafactories when public access depends on private chips, power and capital?
On 30 July 2026 the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking published call for tenders EUROHPC/2026/OP/0008 for up to seven AI Gigafactories, presented as an initiative capable of unlocking more than €30 billion of investment. The procurement documents place that figure in scale. The Union contribution across both phases and both lots is estimated at up to €5 billion, of which up to €1 billion is available under the current Multiannual Financial Framework and the remaining €4 billion is indicative and may be awarded only after 31 December 2027. In every phase the Union pays the lower of the lot ceiling and 17 per cent of the capital expenditure in the computing infrastructure of the project it supports, matched by participating states under the same ceiling, so that combined public purchases reach about 34 per cent of the qualifying investment. Against an indicative cost of at least €4–5 billion for a single facility, the public side buys a defined slice of capacity rather than an installation. The structural constraint follows. EuroHPC and the participating Member States are purchasing a guaranteed share of access time to privately financed and privately operated infrastructure, with the balance of capital and all operating expenditure resting on the consortium. The unresolved question is who decides what the machines do, and whose entitlement prevails, when capacity is scarce.
The report proceeds in seven sections. The first sets out six distinct forms of sovereignty — jurisdictional, corporate, contractual, operational, technological and financial — and tests the published framework against each. The second traces the chain from the AI Continent Action Plan of 9 April 2025 through Council Regulation (EU) 2026/150 to the call itself, using the Official Journal text, the Commission’s launch communication and programme pages, and the EuroHPC consultation document and guidance. The third works through the applicable acquis governing procurement, foreign subsidies, state aid, investment screening, cybersecurity, data protection, artificial intelligence, energy efficiency and export control. The fourth decomposes the public money by instrument rather than by country, reading the tender specifications against national measures adopted in France, Poland, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Portugal and against the Slovenian and Greek recovery-plan documents. The fifth follows the procurement from admission thresholds and capacity minima to service layers, framework duration and the Hosting Agreement. The sixth grades the disclosed evidence of ownership across announced projects, including the regulated disclosures of 2CRSi and the Spanish shareholding structure. The seventh follows the compute stack from grid connection to firmware and closes on defence and security use, execution risk and the conditions under which the argument would fail. The report does not value any company, rank any bidder or forecast an award.