France Pledges €109B to Challenge Silicon Valley AI

France intends to invest 109 billions of euros in the development of artificial intelligence in order to compete for leadership in this area with the USA and China. Emmanuel Macron spoke about a large -scale program in an interview with France 2 on the eve of the AI ​​Action Summit summit in Paris. Funds will go to create a key infrastructure: the construction of data centers, the extension of computing power and the maintenance of research projects.

Probably, the country thus decided to answer American project Stargate < /A> – a large -scale joint venture Openai, Oracle and SoftBank worth $ 500 billion. In January, President Trump announced the launch of the national infrastructure of artificial intelligence: throughout the country, a network of data centers with supercomputers based on NVIDIA processors will be built throughout the country. The project should help the United States maintain technological superiority over competitors and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Openai will control Stargate with the support of Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia and ARM, and SoftBank is responsible for the financial part with investors from the UAE.

The United Arab Emirates will allocate most of the funds for the French program – up to 50 billion euros for the infrastructure of AI. The MGX investment fund from the UAE, which has already invested in the American Stargate, will become one of the key sponsors. In France, the largest range of data centers with a capacity of 1 gigavatts in Europe will appear. The Canadian company Brookfield is also ready to invest 20 billion euros in various AI projects in the country, including new data centers.

The French initiative supported the entire European technological sector. More than 60 leading companies of the continent, including Airbus, ASML, Siemens and Spotify, joined the EU AI Champions Initiative. Twenty international investors – Blackstone, DST Global, KKR and others – promised to invest 150 billion euros in European AI projects over the next five years.

The country really has everything to succeed in the development of artificial intelligence. Powerful nuclear energy will ensure the operation of energy -intensive computing systems. The French mathematical school, inferior in the number of Fields medals only in the United States, will give the necessary intellectual potential. Mistral is already operating here – the only European developer of large language models. She plans to invest several billion euros in her own date center.

In last year’s report, French lawmakers warned: if it further behind the United States and China, the continent risks turning into a “digital colony”. The Chinese Chat Bottom DeepSeek reached the level of Western analogues like ChatGPT, spending much less funds on the development and implementation. So, American technological domination is not as firmly as it seemed, European developers also had a good chance to show themselves.