"We are back in the race (...) and I can tell you we will go fast." Speaking from the Grand Palais in Paris on Monday, February 10, at the close of the first day of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron exulted. He made the diplomatic event look like Choose France, the business summit launched in 2018 to promote France's attractiveness to foreign companies. A few hours earlier, at a closed-door meeting at the Elysée, a dozen tech leaders had pledged to invest €109 billion in France, mainly in new data centers and computing facilities dedicated to AI.

This "historic" and "colossal" amount, in the words of the Elysée, rivals with or even exceeds – in terms of proportion of gross domestic product – the $500 billion Stargate plan announced in January by US President Donald Trump. Of the €109 billion, 50 billion will come from the United Arab Emirates investment fund, MGX, already involved in Stargate. This money will be used to build a 1 gigawatt (GW) AI-dedicated campus – roughly the power of a nuclear reactor.

Twenty billion euros will come from Canadian fund Brookfield, including €15 billion for data centers developed by its French company Data4 and €5 billion in various technologies. The British company Fluidstack, meanwhile, has committed to deploying the "world's largest decarbonized AI supercomputers" in France, with a capacity of 1 GW, with an initial investment of €10 billion.

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