Iliad is bringing together Orange, EDF, Hugging Face, Kyutai, Quandela and Artefact in a consortium aimed at building an AI “gigafactory” in France, a move that underscores the country’s ambition to strengthen its position in the global race for artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The initiative is designed to pool industrial, energy, research and software expertise around a large-scale AI compute facility. Iliad, the telecoms group behind Free, is positioning itself as a central coordinator for the project, while the presence of Orange and EDF signals the importance of both connectivity and power supply in making such an infrastructure viable. Hugging Face, Kyutai, Quandela and Artefact add a layer of AI model development, research, quantum-related expertise and consulting capabilities.
The consortium reflects a broader European effort to reduce dependence on non-European cloud and AI infrastructure by creating sovereign capacity on French soil. A gigafactory of this kind would be intended to support the training and deployment of large AI models, which require massive computing power, specialized hardware and reliable energy access. The involvement of EDF is particularly notable given the energy intensity of AI workloads, while Orange’s participation suggests a focus on network and data-center connectivity.
By assembling players from telecoms, energy, AI research and applied services, the group is betting that France can become a credible hub for next-generation AI infrastructure. The project also highlights the growing convergence between traditional industrial actors and AI-native companies as they seek to capture value in the infrastructure layer of the AI economy.