Local on Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a total of 100 billion euros of private investment in the AI ecosystem. Paris is holding an Artificial Intelligence Action Summit this week. This is the third international summit focusing on AI after previous events in Bletchley Park in the UK and Seoul, South Korea.
“Europe is speeding up tonight, France is about to speed up,” Macron told a television interview with France 2 and in India’s first post, teeing his investment in 100 billion euros of artificial intelligence. did. He said it will unfold in “the next few years.”
He added that the money pot is “exactly equivalent to what the US announced at Stargate is $500 billion in France.” (With 68 million residents, France has five times fewer people than the US)
TechCrunch has begun counting all investment pledges from foreigners and local players that have been rolling over the past few days. Coming from the United Arab Emirates (and MGX), €3 billion to 5 billion from the Canadian investment company Brookfield, €10B from BPIFRANCE and €3B from French telecom company Iliad, totalling €83B I’ve reached it. ($85 billion) As of Sunday.
Some companies have not yet announced plans. During the interview, Macron mentioned Orange and Thales as other investors in the program.
Most investments go to data centers focused on new AI. So comparison with Stargate.
Macron also discussed French AI startups that moved their headquarters to the US, including Mistral, Owkin and Wondercraft. He said he believes Europe is still competitive when it comes to artificial intelligence startups.
“There was a race to scale up. Everyone thought you had to be bigger and stronger than usual. What did Deepseek do with the open model? They’re all accessible from the latest Openai models. “We’ve adopted innovations and adapted them to our own models using a more modest approach,” he said. “Everyone continues this, and that’s why you have to be in this race.”
Mistral’s Data Center Project
Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, has also announced plans to invest billions in AI clusters. The Paris-based company is probably the only European company working on foundation models that can compete with models such as Alibaba, Humanity, Deepseek, Meta, Open Eye.
“We’re going to do a bit and invest billions of euros in the cluster, which will be set up in the Essonne, allowing us to train a more efficient system in just a few months,” Mensch said on French TV TF1. I did. .
The announcement could be seen as another response to the Stargate project, a $500 billion investment program led by Openai and SoftBank, building multiple data centers for AI in the US.
As a reminder, the majority of France’s power generation comes from nuclear power plants. France also produces more electricity than it uses. On Monday, the French government announced that the country plans to pledge 1 gigawatts of nuclear power generation for AI training by the end of 2026.
High-tech companies are considering new locations for power-rich data centers, so they ideally have carbon-free power, but France will appear as the ideal location for Europe for these projects. can.
“In France, there is an extraordinary lead. Macron said: And we export this low-carbon electricity.”
According to the French president, the country exported 90th of electricity to its neighboring countries in 2024. France is currently planning to use its headroom to attract foreign investments.
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