As Paris is hosting the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron revealed that the local AI ecosystem has secured €109 billion in private investments.
President of France, Emmanuel Macron, announced a €109 billion investment in artificial intelligence spread over the next few years in a TV interview broadcast on France 2 and India’s First Post.
According to the French President, the initiative might be treated as the equivalent of the United States’ Stargate project, as for France, with its 68 million citizens, $112 billion is equally significant as $500 billion for the much larger U.S. economy.
The aggregate investment package aimed at bolstering France’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector includes up to €50 billion from the UAE allocated for the development of a 1-gigawatt data center in France and €20 billion from the Canadian investment firm Brookfield dedicated to AI infrastructure projects, including data centers.
Additionally, France’s public investment bank, Bpifrance, has committed to investing €10 billion in the French AI ecosystem by 2029, while French telecom company Iliad pledged €3 billion on local AI infrastructure. Besides, French AI firm Mistral also announced plans to invest a few billion euros towards building its own data center in France.
The move is a positive sign for the European AI ecosystem, which is still lagging behind major AI markets like the U.S. and China. Despite the smaller growth scale, several European countries are emerging as key players in AI innovation and infrastructure development in the region. These include Estonia, with the highest number of AI startups per capita in Europe; Switzerland, with its 67 AI startups, Germany, and France.
Although not a part of the EU, Ukraine is also an important European AI hub. It is home to over 240 companies that deal with artificial intelligence, making it second among the countries with the most AI startups in Central and Eastern Europe.
To boost its tech potential, the EU has adopted a Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence, which seeks to accelerate investment, implement AI strategies, and align innovation policies to prevent fragmentation within Europe, creating a robust and cohesive AI ecosystem.
Besides, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has already selected sites in Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, and Sweden to host the first European AI Factories with advanced computational resources (so-called supercomputers), set to be deployed this year. The AI Factories in Spain and Finland will feature an experimental platform for developing and testing advanced AI models and applications.
