French President Emmanuel Macron has announced €109 billion of private investment in France's artificial intelligence ecosystem. This is a response to the American Stargate project, which plans to invest $500 billion in the construction of data centers. This was reported by TechCrunch.
Macron said that Europe and France will accelerate in investment and development of artificial intelligence over the next few years. He also stated that the €109 billion investment is the equivalent of $500 billion in investment in the Stargate project, as France's population is five times smaller.
The United Arab Emirates and MGX Fund Management Limited plan to invest between €30 and €50 billion, with €20 billion from Canadian investment company Brookfield, €10 billion from Prifrance, and €3 billion from telecommunications company Iliad. In total, this amounts to about €83 billion out of the €109 billion announced.
Emmanuel Macron said that most of these investments would go into building new data centers, which is where the comparison with the Stargate project came from. At the same time, Macron cited DeepSeek as an opportunity for Europe to catch up with the United States in the field of artificial intelligence.
"There was a race to scale up. Everybody thought you always had to be bigger and stronger. What did DeepSeek do with its open models? They have taken all accessible innovations from the latest OpenAI model and adapted them to their own model, using a more frugal approach. Everyone will continue to do this. And that’s why you have to be in this race," Emmanuel Macron said.
The co-founder and CEO of the Paris-based startup Mistral, which is the only European startup that can compete with the models of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others, also announced plans to build new data centers in France to create new large-scale language models.
Macron also emphasized that France has one of the most decarbonized, controlled, and secure energy systems in the world. He wants to use this advantage to attract more AI projects.