French President Emmanuel Macron has declared €109bn worth of investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in France over the coming years, as Europe seeks a greater domination in the rapidly developing industry dominated by the US and China.
Macron’s the new endorsement ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris, which will be on Monday, including discussions between world leaders and AI executives such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
It follows US President Trump’s last month’s announcement of a $500bn AI infrastructure project known as Stargate, to be developed in America and led by OpenAI and SoftBank.bGiant tech groups Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have lined up $300bn this year for AI-related capital expenditure.
Amid this, Chinese AI tech Deepseek is accomplishing massive milestones in developing competitive and low-cost AI models, while Huawei is investing heavily in building chips that can compete against Nvidia. Flaced with such competition, “Europe and France must accelerate their investments,” Macron said on Sunday.
To that end, France will declare on Monday that companies have agreed to invest €109bn in AI projects in the country in the coming years. “This is similar for France to what the US announced for Stargate,” Macron said.
The move underscored Macron’s commitment that France and Europe are part of the global competition to develop and manufacture cutting-edge technology.
One such sponsorship in France will come from the United Arab Emirates, which said last week that it will invest as much as €50bn on a new campus for data centres.
Initial funding will come from Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, a $100bn investment vehicle also part of Stargate, while a consortium of French companies would join later.
On Sunday, Canadian asset manager Brookfield also declared a €20bn investment to support the stationing of AI infrastructure in France.
Another result of the Paris summit will be the esta5 of a non-profit investment fund called Current AI that aims to further so-called “public interest AI”, such as the development of privacy-friendly, anonymised healthcare data for AI projects. Some €400mn has been promised towards a five-year fundraising goal of €2.5bn.
On Monday, Venture capital firm General Catalyst announced that it is leading a wider investment group that proposed to spend €150bn over the next five years to build AI within companies, invest in European AI start-ups and develop critical infrastructure in the region.
The plan, similar to the EU AI Champions Initiative, is crafted to “establish Europe as a global leader in AI”. Other private equity and venture investors joined the initiative include KKR, Blackstone, EQT, CVC and DST Global. Some of the investors’ specific spending proposals are yet to be determined.
This initiative is also being backed by more than 60 European companies, comprising German automaker Volkswagen, Swedish music streamer Spotify, and Italian-Dutch investment group Exor. These companies are determined to “accelerate and adopt” AI but have not committed to specific spending on the technology.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, with new policy proposals seeking to eliminate red tape to harmonise and simplify the EU’s AI and data laws.
Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, managing director of General Catalyst, said she had clustered figures from European industry to purchase into European AI, saying, We have had a wake-up call, and we are now deregulating, we’re activating, we’re getting ready.”
European start-ups have fallen behind their US and Chinese counterparts as they face a challenge due to insufficient investment, access to computing power, and uncertainty on how to apply regulations. For Macron, the summit is a chance to demonstrate that France can still wield soft power on big global matters such as AI.
He has supported Europe to build its own AI platforms and applications so as not to depend only on US and Chinese innovations for a technology that will affect so many areas of business, consumers, and society.
