Macron and Modi court tech CEOs with personal diplomacy to win massive AI infrastructure deals

Macron and Modi turn on personal charm offensives as France and India race to secure AI investment

The push comes as the U.S. and China remain ahead in AI, with other countries struggling to not get left behind. Countries are scrambling not to fall behind in AI -- and French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are leading a personal charm offensives to court tech CEOs. The pair have ramped up moves to court leaders of the world's biggest tech companies this year, as they look to secure investment and major AI infrastructure projects. They stand out among the countries scrambling to develop the data centers and ecosystems needed to power the tech, for their use of personal relationships. The French President hosted AI bosses at the G7 summit in June, and personally convinced SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son to invest tens of billions of dollars into AI data centers in the country. Modi met with Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy last Thursday, and welcomed the U.S. tech giant's "record $48 billion investment" in the country, of which $21 billion will be for AI and cloud infrastructure. Modi last year met Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan, with all of them committing to help develop India's AI ecosystem. In May, SoftBank announced plans to build 3.1 GW of AI data centers in France by 2031, as part of a 75-billion-euro program to roll out 5 GW of AI data center capacity. Macron requested a meeting with SoftBank's Son to persuade him to commit to the project two months earlier, and the two exchanged texts as they hashed out the details, Son told CNBC in an interview. Macron touted France's power capacity -- the country gets a large amount of its electricity from nuclear -- and committed to securing the SoftBank projects 3GW instead of 2GW, the number the French premier first suggested, he added. "His team, the government team is very supportive," Son said. "His team and our team work in collaboration very well." Around the same time, Macron approached tech bosses to join a working lunch with world leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump, at the G7 conference in June, which France was hosting. CEOs including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis all took part. Other tech chiefs including France-based Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Canada's Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Italian company Domyn's Uljan Sharka, U.K. AI scaleup Synthesia's Victor Riparbelli and German-based Black Forest Labs' Robin Rombach were also there. Modi too hosted top U.S. tech leaders earlier this year at the Global AI summit in India, leading to commitments of hundreds of billions of dollars into Indian AI efforts. "India does not see fear in AI. India sees fortune in AI. India sees the future in AI," Modi said in his opening remarks at the summit in February, urging global tech leaders to "Design and Develop in India" to deliver to the world. Securing investments and partnerships for developing AI has been a top priority for Modi. India does not yet produce cutting-edge chips domestically, nor does it have a frontier-scale foundation model on a par with leading U.S. or Chinese models, so it is widely seen as a laggard in the AI race. The prime minister has been encouraging global tech firms to invest in developing AI infrastructure and chips in the country. Months before the summit, India secured Microsoft's largest investment in Asia to help build the sovereign capabilities needed for India's AI-first future, while Google announced an investment of $15 billion in India to build the firm's largest AI hub in the world outside of the U.S. To encourage hyperscalers to build AI data centers in India, Modi's government has offered long‑term tax breaks to them. It is also encouraging local companies to develop semiconductors in the country. During Modi's visit to the Netherlands in May, Dutch firm ASML said it would supply advanced lithography tools and solutions for the 300mm semiconductor fab being set up by Indian firm Tata Electronics. Intel's Lip-Bu Tan, who met Modi last December, also signed up as a prospective buyer for chips made by Tata Electronics. India relies heavily on foreign AI models and computing hardware, which makes its AI ambitions vulnerable to export control directives of other countries. The recent global AI stocks rally has completely skipped India due to the lack of any large-scale AI play, making Modi's urgency to attract capital and technology evident and all the more important. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Macron and Modi court tech CEOs in AI infrastructure race

Macron and Modi are personally courting tech CEOs to secure AI infrastructure investment. Macron texted SoftBank's Son to land a €75 billion data centre deal, and Modi secured $48 billion from Amazon after a direct meeting with CEO Jassy. The global race for AI infrastructure has become a contest of personal relationships. French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have emerged as its most aggressive practitioners, personally courting the heads of the world's largest technology companies to secure data centre investments that will determine where the next generation of AI systems are trained and deployed. Their methods differ in style but share a common principle: the people who control the capital respond to direct engagement from heads of state, not policy papers. The results, so far, have been measured in tens of billions of dollars. Macron's method Macron's most significant win came in May, when SoftBank committed up to €75 billion to build 5 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity in France. The first phase, worth €45 billion, will deliver 3.1 gigawatts across three sites in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, with state-owned EDF providing a former power plant in Bouchain as one of the locations. The deal was the product of personal engagement. Macron approached SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son during a visit to Japan earlier this year, and the two exchanged text messages as they negotiated the details. In June, Macron used France's G7 presidency to host a working lunch that seated world leaders alongside the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Mistral. The Choose France Summit that preceded it attracted €93 billion in total investment pledges, with AI infrastructure as the centrepiece. Modi's approach Modi has pursued a parallel strategy with a different roster of partners. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met the prime minister in New Delhi in late June and announced a $48 billion investment commitment through 2030, of which $21 billion will fund AI and cloud infrastructure expansion in Mumbai and Hyderabad. At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Modi held bilateral meetings with 16 AI startup CEOs, including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis. India then served as the AI Country Partner at VivaTech 2026 in Paris, with more than 80 Indian deep-tech companies exhibiting alongside their European counterparts. The Indian pipeline is enormous. Reliance Industries committed $110 billion to AI infrastructure over seven years, Google pledged $15 billion for what it calls India's first gigawatt-scale AI hub, and OpenAI is partnering with Tata Group to build 100 megawatts of capacity with plans to scale to one gigawatt. What they are competing against The UK offers a cautionary tale. OpenAI paused its Stargate UK data centre project in April, citing electricity prices roughly four times higher than in the United States and unresolved regulatory questions around AI copyright. China is pursuing a different model entirely, offering AI capabilities to developing nations as a geopolitical tool while the G7 debates export controls. The competition Macron and Modi face is not just with each other but with a rival approach that treats AI distribution as diplomacy by other means. The pledge problem The sums involved carry a familiar caveat. SoftBank's €75 billion is an "up to" commitment, Amazon's $48 billion is cumulative from 2026 through 2030, and the £31 billion in UK tech investment pledges that accompanied Stargate UK have largely failed to materialise. The difference, so far, is that France has construction underway at identified sites with EDF as energy partner, and India has signed contracts with specific timelines and corporate entities whose reputations are attached to delivery. Whether the personal relationships that generated these commitments can sustain them through years of construction, permitting, and energy procurement is the question that neither charm nor text messages can answer.