Amid a global speculative AI investment boom, the EU and the European Investment Bank (EIB) are pledging billions in public money to attract private investors in AI and data centres.
The InvestAI Initiative for instance aims to mobilise €200 billion through the “world’s largest public-private partnership for AI”. But the uncertainty[1] and secrecy around these fundings make it difficult to know what kind of AI is being developed with the help of public money, their climate impact and which companies will benefit from it. Is the EU not just adding fuel to an alarming speculative AI boom, using public money to protect the losses of private investors that may follow? Data centres consume enormous amounts of energy, directly undermining the energy transition and access to energy for essential needs. What will be the environmental and social costs of this investment frenzy in such energy-guzzling infrastructure?
Who gets the money? European public bankers won’t say
Here is the catch : whilst the corridors of European institutions were almost empty, on 30th July, the EU released a call for tenders for AI gigafactories, namely large-scale facilities dedicated to the development and training of next-generation AI models. This call follows the announcement, under the InvestAI Initiative, of €20 billion to build four to five AI gigafactories across Europe. To turn words into cash, the Commission launched between April and June 2025 an informal call for expressions of interest to gather preliminary information from interested consortia made up of European companies, private investors and one or more Member States. The call specifies that, in parallel, the Commission will establish the InvestAI facility, the ad hoc vehicle to leverage private investment in AI gigafactories, with the potential participation of the EIB Group. It also clearly requests respondents to “specify (…) the financial facilities that may become available from the EIB (e.g., direct loans) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) (e.g., infrastructure funds, private equity), (…)”.
Indeed, at the end of 2025, the EIB and the Commission signed a Memorandum of Understanding under which the EIB Group committed to complement EU grants with loans to leverage private investment. This means the EU public bank will provide favourable loans to European companies for them to more easily find cash on the private market. Through the InvestEU Advisory Hub, the EIB Group will also provide tailored advisory support to interested AI gigafactory consortia.
76 consortia applied to the informal call, with proposed investments exceeding €230 billion. Negotiations started between the EIB, the Commission and the consortia. They took place behind closed doors for more than one year. Meanwhile, the official call for tenders slipped from late 2025 to early 2026, then to spring, before finally appearing in mid-summer.
Despite involving “unprecedented capital” as Commission Executive Vice-President for technological sovereignty, security and democracy Henna Virkunnen herself mentioned, and the prospect of substantial EIB and EIF loans, the entire process showcased a striking lack of transparency. The Commission has stated it will not disclose the identity of the respondents of the informal call, leaving the potential beneficiaries largely unknown, while negotiations with the Commission and the EIB Group remained confidential. This raises serious questions about the value of the July 2026 official call if key projects and financing arrangements have already been discussed in advance.
And it raises democratic concern. The April 2025 call was for four to five gigafactories. The July 2026 call mentions the construction of seven. The Commission also refers to an objective of unlocking €30 billion of which €10 billion[2] would be EU and national funding intended to leverage private investment. Who decided? Who exerted influence for the amount of gigafactories and investments to increase ? And if this was the work of the consortia, why can we not know the names of those who lobbied successfully?
With the EU entering the AI race, the EIB Group is set to become a major stakeholder, particularly in a context of growing demand for ever more powerful and increasingly capital-intensive computing infrastructure.
This flow of public and private investments into AI and data centres warrants careful scrutiny, given growing concerns about the lack of transparency, the use of public money to secure private profits, and the risk of undermining Europe’s clean energy transition.
Public money, private deals, zero transparency
As investment decisions increasingly shape the development of AI in the EU, the lack of transparency regarding who benefits from massive investments and how public funding translates into public value raises significant concerns, particularly as the sector has historically been characterised by patterns of opacity[3].
As outlined above, the entire process, from the informal to the formal call, is symptomatic of a broader lack of transparency. Apart from a few consortia that have chosen to communicate publicly, such as AION, launched by Scaleway (the French lliad Group’s cloud services subsidiary), with notably the electric utility company EDF, most potential beneficiaries remain unknown, while major discussions happen amid closed doors. More generally, the European financing structure remains unclear, notably concerning the connection between the new InvestAI facility and the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). This public-private partnership was amended in January 2026 to include in its mandate the deployment of AI gigafactories, and it is now the home for the formal call for tenders.
Opacity also emerges when investments flow through indirect channels, making final beneficiaries difficult to foresee, identify and scrutinise. This is particularly the case when it comes to the EIF, which operates under an indirect funding model, providing debt and equity to financial intermediaries. In May 2025, the EIF and CDP Equity, the investment arm of the Italian public investment bank CDP, jointly announced a combined €200 million investment, including a €86 million InvestEU guarantee, in the PIMCO European Data Centre Opportunity Fund. This fund aims to develop new data centres in high growth European markets, including Madrid, Milan, Berlin,Warsaw, Marseille and Athens. PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company LLC) is one of the world’s leading investment management firms, overseeing more than $2 trillion in assets. Headquartered in California, PIMCO is a subsidiary of the German insurance group Allianz SE. PIMCO and Apto, the data centre company it launched in 2023, do not disclose how the fund’s capital is invested. The EIF’s investment in the PIMCO fund relies on an InvestEU guarantee, touted as the EU’s flagship mechanism for supporting the Union’s climate and industrial priorities. However, it will be challenging to track how these funds are ultimately disbursed and ensure they comply with the EIB and EU climate objective. In practice, it may end up fuelling the opposite of its stated objectives: researchers argue for instance that given the scale of Apto’s annouced €3.4 billion data centre project near Milan, it is likely to be feasible only for American big tech companies. All this under the banner of European sovereignty and backed by a public guarantee, meaning that public money could ultimately foot the bill if the project fails or proves unprofitable.
The lack of transparency and scrutiny over the end-users of public money raises a significant accountability concern, particularly at a moment when lobbying from Big Tech appears more powerful than ever. In that sense, Jean-Christophe Laloux’s participation in the Future Grid & AI Data Centres Europe event on 28–29 September 2026, alongside hyperscalers, investors, data centre and grid operators, is concerning but hardly surprising. As Director General and Head of Lending and Advisory at the EIB, recently appointed Chief Executive of the EIF, he is well placed to have been part of discussions held behind closed doors for more than a year, since the informal call for expressions of interest closed. No environmental or digital rights civil organisations are present in the event.
Too risky for investors? Don’t worry, the European public bank will pay
The EU’s strategy to develop data centres and AI relies explicitly on a de-risking approach. De-risking refers to the practice whereby public financial institutions absorb or reduce risks in order to make projects more attractive to the private sector and secure the profits of companies. Indeed, both the informal and formal calls specify that public contributions would provide financial guarantees, improve bankability, strengthen investor confidence and absorb part of the initial risk.
De-risking is being justified under the assumption that this private investment would not have materialised without EU public funding. However, this is highly questionable.
The need to deploy EU public money to strengthen investor confidence and unlock private capital must be questioned, as a major mobilisation of private investment towards AI is already underway, driven by private equity firms and major asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard, Blackstone and KKR. Data centres have indeed become increasingly strategic assets for financial intermediaries, as demonstrated by the oversubscribed capital raise of Areim DC Fund for its Nordic data centre fund, the massive equity investment of KKR and Oak Hill Capital in the European data centre firm Global Technical Realty (GTR), as well as by the success of PIMCO’s European Data Centre Opportunities Fund, which reached €1.8 billion in final subscriptions, equivalent to 2.4 times its initial €750 million target. As concerns grow over a potential AI financial bubble, with lending from private debt funds to the AI sector projected to reach $600 billion by 2030, de-risking is simultaneously encouraging private investors to further inflate the bubble and expose the public to part of the losses should it burst. EU and national public funds are jointly fuelling this speculative bubble. Member States are indeed encouraged to provide direct grants, loan guarantees and equity injections through National Promotional Banks or Institutions, as is the case in France, where Bpifrance plays a major role in financing AI. National budgets, Cohesion Funds and Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) are also identified as funding sources.
The expected multiplier effect of the de-risking approach remains largely unproven, as highlighted in a recent Counter Balance report. For AI, this should be analysed against the backdrop of an inversion of conditionality: rather than the state (the lender in this case) setting the terms for the deployment of its capital, private financiers attach conditions for their cooperation. The AI Champion Initiative set to mobilise €150 billion of the €200 billion InvestAI Initiative was explicitly tied to the simplification of the EU regulatory environment. Thus, the expansion of public guarantee goes hand in hand with a weakened capacity to ensure policy steer and democratic accountability. By relying on mobilising private finance to fund AI, public authorities grant financial actors structural influence over strategic priorities, even though these actors favour rapid, high-return exits over programmatic, long-term investment with public interest objectives.The EIF’s participation in the PIMCO fund under the InvestEU Programme, despite the fund having already exceeded its fundraising target, raises questions about the added value of deploying public EU money alongside investments from institutional investors, including the Canadian pension fund La Caisse and American pension fund VCERA.
Finally, there is limited proof that those AI investments will effectively benefit people, create decent jobs and advance social, economic and environmental targets. Conversely, substantial evidence shows that data centres drive major use conflicts, particularly over energy, land, and water, while causing devastating environmental and climate damages.
The AI electricity bill will be paid by everyone
Data centres are becoming increasingly massive and energy-intensive, fuelled by hyperscalers’ expansion and the rise of specialised facilities. This comes with a growing electricity burden. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centres will drive 20% of electricity demand growth in advanced economies by 2030, with EU data centre consumption potentially rising by up to 70% by 2030 and 150% in 2035. This could trigger major conflicts over electricity use, as data centres increasingly jeopardize the power supply available to households, green public services, and other essential economic activities.
Data centres already consume a quarter of Ireland’s electricity, a figure projected to reach 30% by 2028. In the Netherlands, they could absorb up to 70% of total electricity consumption by 2050. Hyperscalers recipe is straightforward: they tap into high-quality infrastructure often built and maintained through public support. They also monopolise scarce local energy supplies, notably renewables ones, at the expense of local communities whose taxes finance the infrastructure, as they seek to greenwash their resource-greedy business model. As the Commission itself acknowledged, the AI and Cloud Development Act’s aim to triple EU’s data centre capacity comes with an impact on energy prices and affordability. Irish households pay among the highest electricity prices in Europe, yet data centre operators pay only half as much. In the country, data centres exponential demand has increased household electricity bills by €1.4 billion and made the power grid more unstable.
The EIF’s investment in the PIMCO fund could therefore further strain the electricity grid and drive up bills. Indeed, PIMCO subsidiary Apto announced in May 2025 investments plans for a data centre campus in Lacchiarella, Lombardy, with 300 MVA of capacity. Two months later, Italian oil major ENI unveiled a joint venture with Khazna Data Centers to build a 500MV AI data centre campus in Ferrera Erbognone, just 40 km from Apto’s project. In parallel, the EIB issued in March 2026 a €200 million loan to A2A, an Italian energy provider and distributor, to support electricity infrastructure capacity in the province of Milan. As A2A clearly seeks to become a development platform for data centres, the EIB loan comes as no surprise, with these two majors projects in the pipeline. And it raises concerns that EIB support for grid infrastructure in Lombardy could primarily serve AI expansion, at the expense of households and of the electrification and decarbonisation of other sectors, as already illustrated in Marseille, where electricity constraints have reportedly affected shore-side power for ships.
False solutions undermining the clean energy transition
The data centres scramble risks undermining Europe’s clean energy transition by driving new fossil fuel infrastructure. According to the IEA, in a high-growth scenario, data centres could double their emissions by 2030. Their energy-intensive model pushes them to lock in multiple sources of power to ensure uninterrupted supply and enable ever-increasing capacity, from the building of on-site gas power plants, to the use of diesel generators and of fuel tanks in case outages. Natural gas and coal are expected to meet over 40% of the additional electricity demand from data centres until 2030. The September Future Grid event, at which Mr Laloux will speak, is held in partnership with the European Data Centre Association, whose president recently called on the EU to prioritise AI over the climate transition.
Meanwhile, the sector’s greening, or greenwashing, is increasingly being touted, with projects presented as sustainable solutions, including blue data centres relying in reality on gas and carbon capture, waste-heat recovery, or small modular nuclear reactors.The feasibility of these false solutions raises major concerns: waste-heat recovery is constrained by climate, intermittency, high installation costs and potentially higher energy consumption. Carbon capture capabilities remain highly uncertain and marginal against data centres’ full lifecycle carbon footprint. Small modular nuclear reactors are usually more costly than renewable energy, are still on the design stage, and take similar time to build as large plants.
As highlighted in a joint civil society letter, the EIB is particularly active in supporting these harmful and costly solutions as illustrated by the €200 million loan to the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) for data infrastructures. NIB had notably financed the Falun data centre, developed by EcoDataCenter, which claims to be the world’s first climate-positive data center. However, EcoDataCenter’s sustainability credentials and circular economy claims have been challenged by local residents in Östersund, citing impact on nature and a recreational area, the unaddressed consumption of material resources and reliance on techno-solutions. Besides, if many projects refer to renewable electricity generation capacity, they often translate into contracts for allocating existing production. The AI company UpCloud recently benefited from an EIF-backed investment used to make its data centres more energy-efficient. However, its website nuances this ambition, stating that renewables are used only wherever possible.
On top of that, the current context leaves little room for optimism: the Commission is preparing its post-2030 data centre energy efficiency package, which was initially set to introduce a rating scheme for data centres. Following a call for feedback and amid intense industry lobbying, the plan has been watered down, letting operators rely on broader energy certificates, including some tied to nuclear power, while easing offset requirements.
Build first, justify later
And the elephant in the room remains unaddressed: Why this AI infrastructure race ? For whom ? There seems to be no evidence that the European public bank should join this frenzy, which diverts major investments away from the public good. As the EU’s financial institution, the EIB Group should stop handing out blank cheques and ensure policy steering towards an evidence-based approach that balances genuine digital needs with Europe’s climate, energy and democratic commitments. It should demand full transparency, traceability and oversight, put the burden of proof on those seeking finance by making funding conditional, and back smaller, more compact alternatives.
In turn, the European institutions should pause decisions and open a democratic debate about which AI Europeans actually need and want and how much compute power should be allocated to which priorities, with funding conditional on decarbonisation pathway and directed towards digital commons.
[1] As Open Future’s research highlights, headline figures and political and corporate announcements about AI investment often conflate different types of commitments, lack transparency and verification, and blur the distinction between new and previously announced investments, as well as between pledges and investments that actually materialise.
[2] Of this €10 billion public share, only €1 billion is currently committed, while additional EU funding will depend on the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF).
[3] The AI industry operates behind a veil of opacity, using subsidiaries or shell companies, non-disclosure agreements and commercial secrecy to restrict access to information. Projects are also often phased, obscuring their eventual scale and impacts and making public scrutiny difficult.
Author: Alma Kirchhoff