AI Factories and Deployment Centres

Every year, governments across Europe spend trillions on public contracts, equal to 14% of the EU’s economy. Yet in many cases, public tenders go to the lowest bidder, not the best solution. including via more modern, digital services or products. In eight EU countries, over 80% of public contracts still go to the cheapest option, even when it leads to lower quality, more pollution, or systems that break down faster. This short-sighted approach blocks innovation, weakens sustainability goals, and wastes the full potential of public budgets. Europe needs a strong public incentives to reward public projects that advance our climate and digital targets. 

Project scope: 

• Establish cross-border  AI factories and deployment centres featuring regulatory sandboxes and innovation hubs, co-designed with industry to support real-time, high-volume AI inferencing. 

• Support deployment of AI applications in key industrial sectors, e.g. manufacturing, energy, healthcare, mobility, logistics, through testbeds, shared compute access, and applied R&D. 

• Facilitate secure access to public sector datasets to train and scale sector-specific AI models. 

KPIs by 2030: 

• Number of operational AI/quantum infrastructure centres supporting industrial use cases across EU regions. 

• Number of AI-powered applications deployed in manufacturing, healthcare, energy, mobility and logistics as a result of AI factory’s activity. 

• Volume of public sector data processed securely through federated AI models. 

ROIs by 2030: 

• Reduction in downtime, energy waste, or production inefficiencies via AI-powered predictive systems. 

• Billion EUR in added value from AI healthcare innovations unlocked by these computing hubs 

• Share of private-sector compute usage and investment mobilised through public infrastructure (e.g. € leveraged per €1 public funding).