French President Emmanuel Macron announced a total of €109 billion in private investments in the AI ecosystem (around $112 billion at current exchange rates) on Sunday evening. This week, Paris is hosting the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit — the third international summit focused on AI after the one in Bletchley Park in the U.K., and Seoul, South Korea.
“I can tell you this evening, Europe is going to speed up, France is going to speed up. And for us, France, we’re announcing at tomorrow’s summit €109 billion of investment in artificial intelligence over the next few years,” President Macron said in a TV interview on France 2 and India’s First Post.
“What’s that? It’s exactly the equivalent for France of what the United States announced with Stargate — $500 billion — it’s the same ratio.” With 68 million inhabitants, France has five times fewer people than the U.S.
On Sunday, TechCrunch started counting all the investment pledges from foreign and local players that have been rolling in over the past few days. With €30 to €50 billion coming from the United Arab Emirates (and MGX), €20 billion coming from Canadian investment firm Brookfield, €10 billion coming from Bpifrance and €3 billion coming from French telecom company Iliad, we reached a total of up to €83 billion ($85 billion).
So a few companies haven’t announced their plans just yet. During the interview, Macron mentioned Orange and Thales as other investors in the program. Most of the investments will go toward new AI-focused data centers. Hence, the comparison with Stargate.
Macron also shed a light on French AI startups, such as Mistral, Wandercraft and Owkin, which has moved its headquarters to the U.S. He believes Europe is still competitive when it comes to artificial intelligence startups and even said that DeepSeek represented an opportunity to catch up.
“There was a race to scale up. Everybody thought you always had to be bigger and stronger. What did DeepSeek do with its open models? They have taken all accessible innovations from the latest OpenAI model and adapted them to their own model, using a more frugal approach,” he said. “Everyone will continue to do this. And that’s why you have to be in this race.”
Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, also announced plans to invest billions in an AI cluster. The Paris-based company is arguably the only European company working on foundation models that can compete with models from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Alibaba and others.
“We’re going to do our bit and invest several billion euros in a cluster, which will be set up in Essonne, so that we can train even more efficient systems in just a few months’ time,” Mensch said on French TV TF1.
Those announcements could be considered as a reaction to the Stargate Project, a $500 billion investment program led by OpenAI and SoftBank to build multiple data centers for AI in the United States.
As a reminder, the majority of France’s electricity production comes from nuclear power plants. France also produces more electricity than it needs. As tech companies are looking at new locations for power-hungry data centers — ideally powered by carbon-free electricity — France appears as an ideal location in Europe for these new projects.
“In France, we have an extraordinary lead. We produce some of the most decarbonized, controllable and safe electricity in the world. We have the safest and most stable grid. And we export this low-carbon electricity,” Macron said.
According to him, France exported 90TWh of electricity to neighbor countries in 2024. And France now plans to use that headroom to attract foreign investments.
