France is hosting the blockbuster AI Action Summit this week — and although it’s pitched the event as an opportunity to gather countries all over the world to discuss international AI governance, so far the summit seems to be heavily leaning towards showing off the country’s credentials as an AI superpower.
Before the event even kicked off today, billions of euros worth of investment in France’s AI sector had already been announced. Most focused on building data centres in the country — infrastructure that is critical to develop, train and run AI models.
It’s not the only country in Europe with an eye on bolstering compute capacity. Last month the UK announced billions of pounds in funding for its own data centres as part of the government’s AI plan; in 2024, Microsoft announced it would invest €3.2bn in Germany to double the artificial intelligence and cloud capacities of its data centers, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans to invest €8.8bn to bolster the country’s cloud infrastructure.
But France has taken the scale of investment up a notch. Speaking on national television on the eve of the summit’s opening yesterday, French president Emmanuel Macron announced a total €109bn in AI investments over the next five years. He highlighted that this is the equivalent for France of the Stargate project in the US — a $500bn AI infrastructure plan unveiled by the US government last month.
Macron’s announcement includes funding from the UAE, which last week announced it is backing a €30bn-50bn data centre in France, as well as from “large investment funds in the US and Canada”. It also includes funding from New York-based investment firm Brookfield, which today announced a €20bn investment in AI in France, including €15bn for data centre projects.
There was also news from French AI darling Mistral, which said that it’ll invest “billions of euros” to build its own data centre in France; Swedish cloud startup Evroc unveiled plans to build a hyperscale data centre in the country too.
“All these announcements are welcome,” Karim Beguir, the CEO of AI company InstaDeep, tells Sifted. “If they materialise, they will mean that France and Europe will be able to compete in this race with the US and China.”
Greener AI
Increasing France’s data centre capacity has long been a priority for the French government.
To run their AI models, most European AI companies today rely on infrastructure provided through the cloud by US tech giants such as AWS, Microsoft and Google, which together account for 64% of the global cloud market.
Reducing Europe’s dependence on these players is seen as critical to enabling the emergence of independent AI champions in the region.
Already in 2025 that seems to be an obvious target for the French government. Last week, it announced a new set of objectives as part of its AI strategy (a national strategy that launched in 2017), with a heavy focus on boosting the country’s AI infrastructure. Up to 35 sites have been identified across France as potential spots for future data centres, according to the government, representing up to a gigawatt of compute power in total. This is roughly equivalent to some of the data centres built by hyperscalers like Microsoft.
Data centres currently account for about 1% of global GHG emissions, and are only set to grow as AI workloads get larger. Supporting the development of AI in a more sustainable way has therefore become top-of-mind.
France has a key advantage in this area: the country has a very low-carbon electricity mix owing to its large nuclear fleet. In 2024, up to 95% of electricity in France came from nuclear and renewable sources, meaning it has the third lowest greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity for electricity production in the EU (behind Sweden and Finland).
Because of that it wants to establish itself as a leader in the field. One of the main objectives put forward by the government for the AI Action Summit is to “develop more frugal, environmentally friendly AI systems”.
Data centres for digital sovereignty
To support the deployment of AI infrastructure at scale, France is teaming up with partners that have deeper pockets, such as the UAE and the US.
Yann Lechelle, the founder of Probabl, a French government-backed private AI company that provides open-source machine learning tools, points to the report published last year by former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, which showed an €800bn investment gap in Europe.
“Where are we going to find this?” says Lechelle. “Finding external funding is almost a necessity.”
That said, the extensive involvement of foreign investors in the latest announcements could raise questions around France’s ability to protect its interests as these projects are carried out.
“I hope the contracts stipulate that the keys belong to the provider of energy and of the ground that these data centres will be built on,” says Lechelle.
Lechelle adds that it is useful to diversify sources of funding to avoid depending only on US capital — “as long as this funding doesn’t impose conditions that are penalising.” The exact terms of the agreement between France and the UAE haven’t been disclosed.
Tariq Krim, a French tech entrepreneur and founder of tech think tank Cybernetica, wrote in a newsletter that the devil will be in the details.
“The objective is clear,” wrote Krim, “to reduce dependence on US semiconductors, avoid the constraints of the Chinese cloud, and secure sovereign access to compute power. But if Paris doesn’t negotiate skillfully, this agreement could erode France’s digital sovereignty, leaving Abu Dhabi in a dominant position in a key sector for the future.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/france-data-centre-investments-analysis/
