US-based artificial intelligence chip maker Cerebras said on Thursday that it plans to bring its first European data centre capacity online by the end of 2026, followed by a rapid expansion across France and the Nordics, boosting its AI computing capacity in Europe.
Cerebras said in a statement that demand for local, low-latency AI infrastructure has surged across European businesses, research institutions and governments seeking alternatives to compute capacity concentrated in the US and Asia.
The company plans to build a network of AI data centres across Europe by the end of 2027, with a combined power capacity of 200 MW.
Power capacity is the main yardstick for AI data centres because electricity has become the key constraint on expanding AI computing. For comparison, smaller enterprise data centres typically consume between 1 and 20 MW, whereas hyperscale facilities operated by cloud providers can draw 100 MW or more.
Cerebras said that part of its planned data centre capacity is expected to support OpenAI workloads under the companies' existing partnership.
"These are massive expansions" worth several billion dollars, chief executive Andrew Feldman told AFP on the sidelines of the RAISE Summit in Paris.
The expansion comes as AI infrastructure investment accelerates across Europe, where Nvidia says its technology powers more than 90% of the continent's announced AI factory projects.
Cerebras' expansion is expected to provide high-speed AI inference infrastructure to European users, helping deliver faster response times for increasingly complex AI workloads.
"These deployments will enable us to move decisively on what our customers have been asking for: fast, high-performance AI compute located in Europe," Feldman said in the company statement.
Founded in 2015, Cerebras has focused on chips dedicated to AI inference.
The process, through which AI models provide responses to users' everyday prompts, has different requirements from the intensive process of "training" a new AI system.
Appetite for inference-specific chips has exploded as more people use AI agents, a new type of interface that can carry out tasks autonomously on behalf of users.
Agents require vastly expanded computing resources from companies such as Cerebras, Nvidia and AMD.
But transatlantic tensions have made many governments and firms wary of overreliance on US providers.
In Europe, demand for computing power to run generative AI is "extraordinary... growing very, very quickly", Feldman told AFP, adding that the sector's growth is "faster than we can keep up".
"By putting data centres across Europe... we think that we can meet all the unique European requirements" on issues such as data sovereignty, he added.
The AI infrastructure boom helped Cerebras raise $5.5bn in its initial public offering (IPO) in the US in May, making it one of the 15 largest IPOs in Wall Street history.
