Poland Raises the Stakes in the Race for an AI Gigafactory, Targeting €1 Billion and 75,000 GPUs

Poland has revealed the full scale of its plan for a European artificial intelligence gigafactory. After an earlier pledge of €100 million to get things started, the government and the Ministry of Digital Affairs are now laying out details of financing that could reach €1 billion, along with a tender timeline set to begin later this month.

From Pledge to Concrete Timeline

The Polish government's earlier announcement was limited to the Standing Committee of the Council of Ministers approving a first tranche of €100 million to kick off the bid for an AI gigafactory. The Ministry of Digital Affairs is now revealing a much broader picture: a second financing phase of around €400 million and a total public support ceiling reaching €1 billion, half of which is expected to be guaranteed by the European Commission under the InvestAI initiative.

The financing model is unusual for infrastructure investment of this scale. The state and the European Union are not meant to fund the construction itself, but rather to guarantee the purchase of computing services for five years, which is meant to significantly reduce the risk for the companies that will actually build and operate the center. The total cost of the undertaking is estimated at around €3 billion.

75,000 Processors in Two Phases

The planned gigafactory is meant to have computing power equivalent to 75,000 Nvidia H100-class graphics processors, chips delivering around 4 petaflops of AI performance and roughly 80 billion transistors each, equipped with HBM3 memory. The first phase of the investment is expected to cover 25,000 such units, with the target capacity three times higher.

The government has already approved a resolution guaranteeing access to the gigafactory located in Poland. Only seven such centers are set to be built across Europe, meaning Poland is competing for one of very few sites on the continent capable of training and running the most advanced AI models at massive scale.

Tender and Alliance with Other EU States

Under the new timeline, the tender for building the center is set to be announced after July 20, 2026 and will run for 15 weeks. The winning consortium of companies, since it is private entities rather than the state that will submit bids, will have 18 months from signing the contract to launch the service, putting the final deadline at July 1, 2028.

Following this announcement, the next step belongs to businesses - Dariusz Standerski, Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs

Poland is not pursuing the gigafactory alone. Deputy Minister Standerski said the country is in advanced talks with six or seven EU member states about jointly submitting an application to the European Commission. Earlier reports mentioned a similar regional coalition including Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Czechia.

What It Means for Polish Businesses

The center is meant to operate on a compute-as-a-service model for Polish companies and institutions, with applications in medicine, finance, scientific research and cybersecurity. Aleksandra Tomaszewska, Director of the Department of Research and Innovation, argued that Poland, with 38 million consumers, has natural demand to become a regional AI hub rather than merely a recipient of solutions built elsewhere.

The success of the bid in the coming weeks will depend not only on the outcome of talks with Brussels and regional partners, but also on whether private consortia come forward for the tender on terms the government considers sufficient to guarantee a return on investment without directly financing construction from the state budget.

Sources: Benchmark.pl (benchmark.pl), WNP.pl (wnp.pl)