Compute and infrastructure

What this area covers

Where the workloads actually run and what they run on: cloud contracts and their exit terms, supercomputer and AI factory procurements, datacentre builds and the power behind them, network and cable capacity, the processors and accelerators inside all of it, and the standards that decide what may plug into what.

It is the area where the distance between a sovereignty claim and a sovereignty fact is widest, because the claim is usually about the building and the fact is usually about the chip.

No law yet, a proposal and a buyer

There is no law here yet. There is a proposal and there is a buyer.

The proposal: the Cloud and AI Development Act

The Cloud and AI Development Act would create four Union assurance levels. Article 30 would make level 1 the floor for public cloud purchasing, rising with the Article 29 risk assessment.

Annex II excludes hardware from the framework. The consequence is arithmetic rather than rhetoric: the highest available level says nothing at all about the silicon.

The buyer: EuroHPC

EuroHPC sets its own terms in every call and is the largest single source of European public compute money. In the issue.zero window its AI Gigafactories call opened with up to €10bn of public backstop against more than €30bn in total, and no European-processor condition attached to any of it.

Eight days earlier the Joint Undertaking had signed €80m for 1,008 Nvidia GB200 GPUs at MeluXina-AI, integrated by the Italian firm E4 with Dell as subcontractor. The quantum tender in Luxembourg and the industrial supercomputer at Bologna specify no European supplier requirement either.

The one procurement that went the other way

The exception in that window was LUMI-IQ, an IQM system in Finland, and it is the only case where European public money bought European hardware. Quantum is the single compute domain where European suppliers currently compete at the frontier.

Governing the exit rather than the purchase

The Data Act defines switching at Article 2(34) to include the move back to on-premises infrastructure, counts egress inside switching charges at Article 2(36), and requires switching fees to disappear by 12 January 2027.

The recurring shape

European ownership, European operation, American silicon.

It appeared three times in the issue.zero window alone.

Microsoft committed a multibillion dollar sum to Mistral's European GPU capacity, which inverts the usual arrangement: the European lab is the landlord and the hyperscaler is the tenant. The accelerators are still Nvidia's, and Mistral's distribution now runs through Azure.

Orange and Morrison announced a €3bn French datacentre joint venture targeting 400 MW, roughly 10x Orange's current capacity, with neither the tenants nor the hardware named anywhere in the announcement.

In a single week Atos launched a cloud "designed and engineered in the EU" while Zscaler and Schwarz Digits announced a sovereign platform sitting in German datacentres with American software at the control plane. Both used the word. They do not mean the same thing, and European policy has not settled which one it means.

The exception to watch

The ÆTHER consortium bid at Strasbourg is the only gigafactory proposal putting European compute silicon at the centre, built on SiPearl processors and Axelera accelerators. It turns on selection in early 2027, and on whether SiPearl's Rhea1 ships when SiPearl says it will.