Publication stunt or real project? Sunday, February 9 on France 2, Emmanuel Macron announced that nearly 109 billion euros would be invested in France in artificial intelligence (AI), on the eve of the International AI Summit in Paris. While the president specified that this amount represents "the equivalent for France of what the United States announced with Stargate", Donald Trump's gigantic investment of 500 billion euros across the Atlantic, it is difficult to know what these 109 billion really correspond to.
Most of these are sums promised by companies. In this amount, presented as a check that would allow France to catch up - in part - with the United States and China, we find:
- the financing of the United Arab Emirates, announced on February 6, which, according to the Élysée, would consist of a sum ranging from "30 to 50 billion euros". These billions are intended for the construction of a data center in France;
- the investment of Brookfield, a Canadian fund, which has declared that it wants to finance 20 billion euros by 2030, to develop a data center in the north of the country, in Cambrai;
- other sums advanced in France by "large American and Canadian investment funds" and "French companies", according to Emmanuel Macron.
Among the French companies that will invest in AI: Mistral, Free, Orange, Thalès...
Among the latter, the AI start-up Mistral has announced an investment of several billion euros. In the pages of Parisien, the company, which has just launched its conversational agent Le Chat on smartphone, declared that it will build its first data center in France, in Essonne. The project will cost "several billion euros" in investments according to Arthur Mensch, its director, who did not give further details.
Iliad, the group of Free and Kyutai, has, for its part, declared that it would devote nearly 3 billion euros to its data centers. The public investment bank Bpifrance will release nearly 10 billion euros by 2029. These billions will be redirected to data center builders, but also AI start-ups and companies in the sector.
Other French groups are also concerned by this wave of investment announcements, namely, Orange and Thalès, cited by Emmanuel Macron during his interview on Sunday evening. These companies should take advantage of the Summit on Monday and Tuesday to make their statements, unless they wait for the future Choose France 2025 Summit scheduled for next May.
Investments exclusively earmarked for data centers
But if we add up all the figures put forward so far, there are still about twenty billion missing that would make it possible to reach 109 billion. When will they be put on the table? The latter will be invested "in the coming years", Emmanuel Macron specified without giving details on the deadlines for these sums.
All these investments seem to be exclusively earmarked for the construction of these data centers. And that's good timing: last week, the government also announced nearly 35 "ready-to-use" sites for the construction of data centers, in collaboration with EDF and RTE. A map will be unveiled this Monday, February 10, or this Tuesday. With its nuclear fleet, France considers itself the preferred location for any new data center project, these infrastructures essential to artificial intelligence.
The fact remains that other areas, such as semiconductor manufacturing or the construction of open source LLMs, do not seem to be part of the announced investments. Nor is there any trace, in these first announcements, of French cloud players.
Is this major €109 billion plan good or bad news for the country? It is difficult to say, especially since other announcements should be made in the coming hours on the subject. But data centers generally generate few jobs. Nor are they synonymous with "sovereignty" - since everything depends on the components and software used, and not on the location of the infrastructure. The fact remains that for some, the announcement should allow France, presented by the president as "the 5th power" in terms of AI, to stay in the race.
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