The annual Choose France summit looks set to secure €20bn in foreign investments, on top of €17bn that were already announced during the AI Action Summit held in Paris in February.
The investment summit, held annually by president Emmanuel Macron since 2018, gathers hundreds of CEOs, investors and industrial players from around the world and across all industries. Last year the event secured €15bn in foreign investments.
Taken together, Choose France and the Action Summit mean France has won a combined total of €37bn from foreign investors in recent months. Finance minister Eric Lombard said the commitments secured at this year’s summit were “a record”. “In the global competition, France continues to be an attractive country,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Announcements range from investments in tech to culture through industry, defence, mobility and energy.
Choose France
This week’s summit saw a number of tech-related announcements, with UK fintech Revolut investing €1bn into the French market over the next three years and opening a new Western Europe HQ in Paris. The company said that it expects the move to create 200 jobs.
British-Portuguese drone maker Tekever also pledged to invest €100m in France. “This strategic investment will unfold over the next five years, including the creation of Centres of Excellence for Autonomy, 100+ skilled jobs, and an expanded industrial footprint in Occitanie and Nouvelle-Aquitaine,” Tekever said in a LinkedIn post.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which manages nearly $1tn worth of assets and is one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, announced the opening of a new subsidiary company office in Paris to “deepen ties in France”.
A recent report from consultancy firm EY found, looking at the number of foreign implementation and extension projects, that in 2024 France ranked first in Europe with 1,025 projects, ahead of the UK (853) and Germany (608).
At the same time, the country has been hit with strong political instability following the surprise snap election called by Macron in June, which led to a government freeze. The country’s much-delayed budget for 2025 has since increased the tax burden on businesses, including a reduction in tax breaks and an increase in labour costs for R&D-intensive startups.
Investments in the tech sector reflect this: Pitchbook data shows that French startups raised €1.4bn in the first quarter of 2025, a 36.4% drop from Q1 2024 and the worst quarter for VC investment in the past five years.
Data centres take the spotlight
During the AI Action Summit hosted in France last February, Macron announced a total €109bn in AI investments over the next five years, largely to build AI infrastructure across the country. The funding came from a variety of sources including US and UAE investors.
“Now we have €17bn that had been promised in the context of this €109bn announcement… which are going to land,” said Lombard.
The AI Action Summit saw buzzy generative AI startup Mistral commit to investing “several billions of euros” to build its own data centre in France. Now Mistral has announced that it is forming a joint venture with public bank Bpifrance, tech giant Nvidia and the UAE’s AI-focused investment fund MGX to build an AI campus near Paris.
During the AI Action Summit the UAE had also pledged to invest €30bn-50bn to build a data centre in France, partly backed by MGX.
The new campus is expected to have a capacity of 1.4 gigawatts — a similar amount of compute power to some of the data centres built by hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft. Construction is expected to begin in 2026, with operations launching by 2028.
US data centre provider Digital Realty, which had announced a €5bn investment in February, also confirmed that it has already committed €2.3bn for two new projects. The company has started works on a site in Marseille in the south of France, and has also secured a permit to build a campus in Dugny near Paris.
A €10bn investment in a data centre, also announced in February, has been confirmed by Canadian fund Brookfield Asset Management.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/choose-france-paris-tech-startups-macron-revolut/
