Just before flying off to crisis-hit New Caledonia, Emmanuel Macron was back on safer ground. On Tuesday, May 21, the French president spoke on one of his favorite themes – artificial intelligence (AI) – to an audience of engineers and entrepreneurs from the sector invited to the Elysée Palace. "We have the capacity to be one of the countries that are champions of AI," he said.

On the eve of the opening of the VivaTech innovation trade show in Paris on Wednesday, the purpose of his speech was to take up several of the recommendations of a committee on AI's mid-March report. The aim was to further position Paris as the "capital of AI," with a view to holding an international summit on the subject on February 10 and 11, 2025, following on from those organized in London in November 2023 and Seoul this Tuesday, by videoconference.

Like the AI committee, the Elysée is keen to present this technology in a "positive" light. Mastering it is an "existential challenge" for France, said Macron, which has the potential to support growth. "On crucial subjects such as health, education, the transformation of the State or the climate, what AI will enable us to do is a radical revolution," he argued.

Before this, Macron had first set a target of increasing the number of people trained in AI from 40,000 to 100,000 per year (including 20,000 in further education). The idea is to "massively increase" dedicated training courses in universities and schools, and to provide an additional €400 million for France's nine AI clusters, university centers of excellence.

In order to have the computing power needed to drive and operate large-scale models capable, for example, of generating text or images, France must "welcome new data centers," the president also pleaded, recognizing an "enormous competitive advantage" in the "decarbonized and controllable energy" of nuclear power. He praised the infrastructures announced at the Choose France summit by Microsoft, Amazon and Equinix. Paris "is also in talks with players in the United States and Taiwan with the aim of having AI-dedicated semiconductors produced in France or Europe within 12 to 18 months," he explained.

Macron also expressed the hope that "on AI, as on the environment, Europe will not be the continent that regulates the most while investing the least." He called for a doubling of European budgets. In France, he announced the creation of "a very significant new fund, a quarter of which will be underwritten by the French state, to support the least well-funded sectors most technologically linked to AI," such as microchips, data centers and large-scale language processing models. The aim was to avoid involving American companies in the very large fund-raising operations of start-ups such as Mistral or H, which raised €220 million in Paris on Tuesday.

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