Any links to official announcements? I get nothing out of EuroJet, SAAB, BAE, Airbus, Rolls-Royce or MTU Aero.
I'm not going to believe it until there's an agreement on paper. EuroJet has been offering various versions of the EJ200 to all and sundry since the end of the 1990s - SAAB for the Gripen, HAL for the LCA and then the Tejas MK 2, ASELSAN for the TF-X and Korean Aerospace for the KF-X and to any European government that would listen about the Eurofighter.
Proposals were reportedly based around two engine concepts - a "ready now" engine (EJ220 or EJ230) that was avalilable with either 10% or 15% more thrust and potentially thrust vectoring, or a more ambitious "future growth" engine with either 30% or 35% more thrust (EJ260 or EJ270).
Rolls-Royce and MTU Aero have both done work on the EJ200's low pressure compressors, thermal management systems and hot section materials (the EJ200 being a very hot engine), in order to make them more compatible with single-engine fighters. The issue is that these aren't real engines - I think a single uprated "EJ230" core was run about 20 years ago. There's some kind of mock-up engine that used to go to European defense shows.
Plus, the combination of GE and the F414 seems to have cleaned EuroJet's clock everytime an EJ200 derivative has been in the running on a project - reportedly on factors around engine price, deliery timing, maintence/parts availabilty and support localisation.
