Companies have pledged to invest 93 billion euros ($108bn) in France, with half destined for a SoftBank-backed data centre project, as President Emmanuel Macron seeks to leverage nuclear capacity to make the country a global AI leader.
Macron said the 71 projects being unveiled at this year’s Choose France summit marked a record year for foreign investment and were expected to create more than 15,600 jobs at a time when the unemployment level, which remains higher than the EU average, has recently crept above eight per cent.
Japanese tech investor SoftBank will spend 45bn euros to build three data centres with combined capacity of 3.1 gigawatts in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031.
That investment could potentially rise to 75bn euros, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said ahead of Macron’s annual gathering of the global corporate elite, which was due to open at the former royal palace of Versailles later yesterday.
The investment is the latest in SoftBank’s global AI infrastructure spending spree.
It has so far invested over $30bn in OpenAI, taking an 11pc stake in the ChatGPT developer, and has agreed to invest a further $30bn in the company over the course of 2026.
It is also leading the financing of the $500bn Stargate project to build out data centres in the US.
“For us it’s a great achievement,” Macron said of the SoftBank investment yesterday. “We are clearly bridging the gap we had in computing capacity in Europe.”
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