Five Polish Cities in the Race for the EU's AI Gigafactory

Poland has shortlisted five cities still in contention for hosting the EU's artificial intelligence gigafactory. Of the ten locations submitted at the initial stage, Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan, Skawina and Warsaw have advanced to further review - one of them could end up hosting the computing infrastructure that Poland is pursuing jointly with Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

Who decides the location

The final site will be chosen by a special commission set up to evaluate the submitted plots and buildings. The main criterion will be access to sufficient power capacity, since an AI gigafactory is a facility with demand measured in tens, and eventually even hundreds, of megawatts. The second criterion is the local talent pool and academic base, which explains why strong university centers such as Krakow, Wroclaw and Poznan are among the candidates.

Poznan is named as one of the frontrunners, largely thanks to its existing computing infrastructure and plans to expand its local supercomputing center. Wroclaw, meanwhile, has a strong local candidate in Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, which is pushing to build the facility on its campus on Dluga Street. Krakow can draw on the experience of the Cyfronet AGH Academic Computer Centre, which already operates three supercomputers listed on the TOP500 ranking.

An EU-wide tender in the background

Choosing a location within Poland is just one stage of a much larger procurement process run by EuroHPC JU, the European initiative responsible for supercomputing infrastructure. In the first European tender for AI gigafactories, the Commission plans to select seven projects: four medium-scale ones under so-called Lot 1 and three large-scale projects under Lot 2. Poland, together with its Baltic-region partners, is bidding for a spot in the smaller of these two categories.

The tender was announced in July 2026, giving consortia fifteen weeks to prepare their bids. Under the schedule, contracts are due to be signed in early 2027, with the gigafactory itself expected to launch in 2028. The project's value could exceed PLN 10 billion, with the entire financial contribution coming from the private consortium rather than the state budget.

Three Polish consortia and a Baltic alliance

Three consortia from Poland are competing in the tender, as noted by Deputy Digitalization Minister Dariusz Standerski. The project operates under the name Baltic AI GigaFactory and involves cooperation between Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, later joined by the Czech Republic. According to the submission sent to the European Commission, the gigafactory would be built in Poland at no more than two locations, which explains why the list of five cities has not yet been narrowed down to a single winner.

The government's strategy assumes that spreading the infrastructure across several academic centers will make better use of computing resources that already exist, including the two regular AI factories currently operating in Poland - Gaia in Krakow and Piast-AI, now under construction in Poznan. The gigafactory is meant to represent a much bigger leap in computing power, intended for training and providing access to large language models and other AI systems for companies and research institutions across the region.

What it means for Polish companies

For Poland's tech sector, winning the tender would mean access to European-class computing power without relying on foreign cloud providers, an argument officials from the Ministry of Digital Affairs have been making for months, describing computing power as the modern equivalent of oil. A local gigafactory could lower the cost of access to AI infrastructure for Polish startups and research institutions, most of which currently rely on providers from overseas.

The risk cuts both ways, however - losing the EU tender would mean the Baltic region loses out on an investment worth more than PLN 10 billion to competing projects from other parts of Europe. Competition for the seven spots in EuroHPC's first procurement round is fierce, with dozens of locations submitted across more than a dozen EU member states.

The final choice of city within Poland will not be made before the EU tender is resolved, meaning the candidates - Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan, Skawina and Warsaw - will spend the coming months refining their energy and infrastructure offers in parallel. A decision at the European level is expected around the turn of 2026 and 2027, shortly before the contracts are due to be signed.