Build

Build Watch

Where AI Factories Get Built

Build economics are governed by power, cooling supply chains and social license. Europe's sovereign build-out is funded but lagging compute availability, while commercial gigafactories in the Nordics and Iberia race ahead.

Lock CDU capacity early, favor brownfield sites, and price permitting risk. Rack densities are trending toward 1 MW — liquid cooling is no longer elective.

19 + 13

EU AI Factories

Operational + associated Antennas, ~25k chips each

up to 5

EU AI Gigafactories

>100,000 processors each · €20B InvestAI

46%

Liquid cooling market share

By 2024 — now standard for new builds

12–18 mo

CDU lead time

Critical supply-chain bottleneck

75 (~$130B)

Projects disrupted

By community opposition, Q1 2026

1.05

Best-in-class PUE

Compal/ZutaCore two-phase cooling

Density

From 10 kW racks to the megawatt rack

Rack power density is climbing two orders of magnitude — redefining the entire facility.

10 kW

Legacy

35 kW

Inflection

120 kW

Current AI

1 MW

2027–28

5 MW

Specialized

Cooling

From elective to mandatory

Liquid cooling market

$B · $4.8B (2025) to $27.1B (2035)

Cooling technology mix

Approx. share of new AI builds

Pipeline

Commercial gigafactories in construction

ProjectPartnersCapacityPower / notesTimeline
Stargate Norway (Narvik)Nscale, Aker, OpenAI100,000 NVIDIA GPUsRenewable hydropowerPhase 1 H2 2026
Start Campus (Sines, PT)Microsoft, Nscale66,000+ Rubin GPUs—Late 2027
Deutsche Telekom (Munich)NVIDIA, Deutsche Telekom~10,000 Blackwell GPUs~0.5 ExaFLOPSOperational
Mistral AI (Essonne)Mistral, NVIDIA18,000 Blackwell GPUs€830M projectIn build
Lifecycle

Tracked build lifecycle

Each announced build is tracked across seven independent, separately-evidenced facets — announcement, site, grid, planning, procurement, construction and operations — so capacity is never confused with delivery.

Tracked projects are in review. Each build is published only once its facet evidence has a named reviewer and a primary source receipt.

Analysis

The build constraints

The EU operates 19 AI Factories plus 13 “Antennas”, each with ~25,000 AI-optimized chips (LUMI, Leonardo, JUPITER, MareNostrum 5) on >€2.6B of investment. Up to 5 AI Gigafactories are planned — each housing >100,000 processors (~4× current factories) — backed by the €20B InvestAI facility, with 76 submissions across 16 Member States proposing >€230B. CADA aims to triple EU data-centre capacity within 5–7 years.

Turn these signals into a placement decision

Discuss power, location, cluster architecture and TCO with a CUDO AI infrastructure specialist.