Polish Government Guarantees 400 Million Zloty for European AI Gigafactory

Poland's Council of Ministers has adopted a resolution guaranteeing a state contribution of more than 400 million zloty toward building an artificial intelligence gigafactory on Polish territory. The move is a formal prerequisite for the country to even enter the EU competition for one of seven European AI gigafactories, with a decision expected within the next several months.

What the government decided

The resolution adopted by the Council of Ministers secures the funds Poland must put up for a consortium bidding to build a gigafactory on its territory to even enter the European procedure. According to Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs Dariusz Standerski, this amounts to a state guarantee to purchase computing power for 60 months, or five years, meant to give the facility's operator stable demand from the outset.

AI gigafactories are an EU initiative announced by the European Commission in February 2025, conceived as a response to US and Chinese dominance in infrastructure for training the largest AI models. Poland and Lithuania jointly declared their interest in the project back in June 2025, and the European Commission accepted the application a month later. In October 2025, the Commission and the European Investment Bank signed a memorandum to finance the entire program.

Sovereignty as the argument

Speaking to Rzeczpospolita, Standerski described the gigafactory as one of the most effective tools for building Europe's technological sovereignty against American and Chinese AI infrastructure providers. The deputy minister noted that the enormous computing power the gigafactory would provide will serve not only model training but concrete applications in healthcare, industry, transport, energy, robotics and cybersecurity.

Enormous computing power means, among other things, building digital sovereignty and breakthrough applications in healthcare, industry, transport, energy, robotics and cybersecurity - Dariusz Standerski, Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs

Standerski also stressed that Poland is not acting alone on this. The deputy minister spoke of a broad coalition of countries built together with Germany, France and the Nordic countries, which forced the European Commission to amend its original draft regulation on gigafactories.

Poland built a broad coalition of countries together with Germany, France and the Nordic states. Thanks to Poland and the coalition it created, major changes were made to the gigafactory project - Dariusz Standerski, Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs

Seven against the Commission

A group of seven countries, including Poland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain and Sweden, had for months opposed the original financing and governance model for gigafactories proposed by Brussels. According to Standerski, the current version of the project is "much better" than the one from November, and the Council of the EU adopted the amended regulations in January 2026.

The conditions for entering the competition are precisely defined. The consortium leader must be a European entity, the data center operator must be based in the EU, and full equity control must remain with European shareholders. Consortia may, however, choose any member state participating in the initiative as the location, so competition over where the gigafactory will actually be built is still underway.

What it means for Poland

For Poland's IT and AI sector, a gigafactory would mean access to infrastructure on the order of tens of thousands of GPU accelerators, currently unavailable at that scale to any domestic company or university. The installation, built out in stages, is ultimately meant to reach a scale equivalent to at least 75,000 Nvidia H100-class chips, starting from at least 25,000.

The government links this to ambitions of using AI in public administration, healthcare and industry, not just to a desire to attract foreign investment. If Poland wins the competition for one of the Lot 1 gigafactories, it would become one of the few countries in the region with its own EU-funded computing infrastructure of this scale.

The formal EuroHPC JU procedure is due to launch after July 20, 2026, meaning any day now. Consortia will have a quarter to submit bids, decisions on the winners are expected around the turn of 2026 and 2027, and the first gigafactories are planned to go live in 2028. Until then, Deputy Minister Standerski says further negotiations in Brussels lie ahead, in which Poland wants to keep its position as leader of the coalition of countries pushing for changes to the EU program.