AI’s in fashion in France — as it is across the globe — with the technology already helping solve some of the country’s greatest challenges across research and innovation, transportation, manufacturing and many other industries. And this fashion’s here to stay.
France’s National Strategy for AI, part of the broader France 2030 investment plan, includes more than €109 billion in investments for the country’s AI infrastructure projects.
Such projects include a collaboration between NVIDIA and Mistral AI, an independent generative AI pioneer headquartered in France, to build a cutting-edge, end-to-end compute platform that answers the comprehensive compute infrastructure needs of enterprise customers.
Plus, a slew of the nation’s AI-native companies, startups and research centers are innovating with NVIDIA AI infrastructure.
These leading innovators are using the latest agentic and industrial AI technologies to bolster and accelerate work in areas ranging from advertising for skincare and beauty, spearheaded by L’Oréal and Accenture, to transportation and the electric grid.
With its decarbonized, abundant electricity supply, expanding high-voltage electric grid and more than 30 ready-to-use, low-carbon AI sites throughout the country, France is poised to become one of the world’s greenest leaders in artificial intelligence.
Below are some of the key players making AI development the nation’s hottest trend.
AI Infrastructure Development Across Industries
Mistral AI’s new compute platform will feature the latest-generation NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems, with 18,000 Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs planned for deployment in the initial phase and additional plans to expand across multiple sites in 2026. The infrastructure will host Mistral AI’s cloud application service, which customers can use to develop and run AI applications with Mistral AI’s and other providers’ open-source models.
Mistral AI and NVIDIA are optimizing inference performance for several Mistral models with NVIDIA NIM microservices, including the new Mistral Nemotron model, exclusively available with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.
“We are forging Europe’s AI future in partnership with NVIDIA, combining strategic autonomy with our expertise in AI and NVIDIA’s most advanced technology,” said Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI. “This new infrastructure will provide enterprises and the public sector with Mistral’s AI expertise in building the best compute for AI, ensuring full control to businesses.”
In addition, Mistral AI and NVIDIA are collaborating with Bpifrance, the French national investment bank, and MGX, the UAE’s investment fund focused on AI and advanced technology, to establish Europe’s largest AI campus — to be located in the Paris region and expected to reach a capacity of 1.4 gigawatts. The campus will feature advanced NVIDIA compute infrastructure to support the full AI lifecycle, from model training and inference to deployment of generative and applied AI systems.
France-founded European cloud service provider Scaleway offers the European cloud’s largest compute capacity, powered by more than a thousand NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, with plans to offer NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — which enable building and running real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor. As a European provider, Scaleway provides domestic infrastructure that ensures access and compliance with EU data protection laws — critical to businesses with a European footprint.
Mistral AI and Scaleway plan to participate in the DGX Cloud Lepton marketplace to provide startups and developers access to compute infrastructure.
Orange Business, the enterprise division of Orange, one of Europe’s leading telco operators, has joined the NVIDIA Cloud Partner program to accelerate the development of enterprise-grade agentic AI, including its innovative Live Intelligence platform, which empowers companies of all sizes to securely deploy generative AI at scale. Those AI solutions tap into the Orange Business Cloud Avenue platform, built on high-performance NVIDIA infrastructure.
AI Deployments, From Beauty to Transportation
Paris-based beauty company L’Oréal Groupe’s generative AI content platform CREAITECH uses the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform to develop and deploy 3D digital renderings of L’Oréal’s products for faster, more creative development of marketing and advertising campaigns. Eighty percent of L’Oréal’s production in France is exported globally, helping make cosmetics the third-largest contributor to national economic growth.
Learn more about how L’Oréal and other leading retailers are using NVIDIA technologies to redefine their operations.
The France public sector uses NVIDIA technologies for use cases ranging from transportation and public safety in cities to cybersecurity in schools and better fraud detection at the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, which oversees national funds and the economic system. Local governments have deployed solutions in generative and vision AI, document analytics and more through NVIDIA partners Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, LightOn, SCC, ThinkDeep, XXII and others.
France’s national rail operator SNCF Gares&Connexions, which operates internationally and has a network of 3,000 train stations across France and Monaco, is developing digital twins to simulate railway scenarios.
Powered by NVIDIA Omniverse, Metropolis and ecosystem partners Akila and XXII, SNCF Gares&Connexions’ AI deployment, including at the Monaco-Monte-Carlo station, has helped SNCF Gares&Connexions achieve a 100% on-time preventive maintenance completion rate, a 50% reduction in downtime and issue response time, as well as a 20% reduction in energy consumption.
Schneider Electric — a French multinational company driving the digital transformation of energy management and automation — has introduced publicly available engineered reference designs for optimizing performance, scalability and energy efficiency of NVIDIA-powered AI data centers. In addition, AVEVA, a subsidiary of Schneider Electric, is connecting its digital twin platform to NVIDIA Omniverse to deliver a unified virtual simulation and collaboration environment for designing and deploying optimized data centers.
Electricité de France, commonly known as EDF, the French national electricity company, has partnered with NVIDIA to transition its open-source code_saturne computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application, developed by EDF R&D, onto accelerated computing platforms for improved performance in power and industrial applications. This collaboration, which also involves NVIDIA developer partner ANEO, taps into NVIDIA Nsight tools to iteratively adapt the CFD code for optimized GPU operation.
AI-Native Companies Build Models, Cloud Services to Accelerate Next Industrial Revolution
To accelerate France’s AI-driven transformation, NVIDIA is partnering with the country’s leading model builders and AI-native companies to support large language models in various languages including Arabic, French, English, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish and Swedish.
H Company and LightOn are tailoring and optimizing their models with NVIDIA Nemotron techniques to maximize cost efficiency and accuracy for enterprise AI workloads including agentic AI.
Plus, a new Hugging Face integration with DGX Cloud Lepton will let companies fine-tune their AI models on local NCP infrastructure.
Startups Develop Breakthroughs With NVIDIA AI Infrastructure
France has a rich ecosystem of more than 1,000 AI startups pursuing breakthroughs in healthcare, quantum computing and more.
Alice & Bob, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups, is building quantum computing hardware and has integrated the NVIDIA CUDA-Q hybrid computing platform into its quantum simulation library, called Dynamiqs. This allows the company to accelerate its qubit design process with GPUs. Adding NVIDIA acceleration on top of Dynamiqs’ advanced optimization capabilities can increase the efficiency of these challenging qubit-design simulations by up to 75x.
Quandela, a leader in full-stack photonic quantum computing, has announced MerLin, a quantum machine learning programming framework that uses NVIDIA CUDA-Q to deliver high-performance simulations for photonic quantum circuits. This enables developers to build new models and assess the performance of candidate algorithms on simulations of larger quantum processors.
Moon Surgical, a robotic surgery company and also an NVIDIA Inception member, is using the NVIDIA Holoscan and IGX platforms to power its Maestro System for minimally invasive surgery, a technique where surgeons operate through small incisions with an internal camera and instruments. Moon Surgical and NVIDIA are also collaborating to bring generative AI features to the operating room using Maestro and Holoscan.
Research Centers Bring Future of Technology Closer to Reality
As the country with the world’s third largest number of AI researchers, France supports a vast spectrum of projects and centers advancing supercomputing, AI education and other initiatives to make the future of technology possible.
The Jean Zay supercomputer, operated by IDRIS, a national computing centre for the CNRS (France’s National Centre for Scientific Research), is a French AI flagship serving research academia and startups users. Built by Eviden and powered by NVIDIA, the supercomputer accelerates the work of university and public sector researchers, developers and data scientists across France.
Acquired by the French government through intermediary French civil company GENCI, the supercomputer integrates NVIDIA accelerated computing, including more than a thousand NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.
It supports more than 150 startups — including Hugging Face, Mistral AI, H Company and LightOn — and powered 1,400+ AI projects in 2024. Jean Zay is among the most eco-efficient machines in Europe, thanks to the accelerated technologies and core warm-water cooling of the computing servers. In addition, the supercomputer’s waste heat is reused to help heat more than 1,500 homes in the Saclay area, to the southwest of Paris.
Learn more about the latest AI advancements in France and other countries at NVIDIA GTC Paris, running through Thursday, June 12, at VivaTech. Watch the keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and explore GTC Paris sessions.
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