Macron bets France AI future on €75B pledges as G7 summit spotlights Europe's tech ambitions

France hosts the G7 with an AI pitch built on other people's billions

France hosts the summit with a pitch to be Europe's AI hub, propped up by pledges from SoftBank, Brookfield, and others. France took over the G7 this week with Emmanuel Macron pressing artificial intelligence to the front of the agenda and, with it, a good deal of his own standing. The summit runs from 15 to 17 June, and the pitch is straightforward: position France as Europe's AI powerhouse, running on the country's plentiful nuclear electricity. The catch, as Bloomberg framed it, is that much of what would make the case rests on money and infrastructure Macron does not himself command. The headline number arrived ahead of the summit. SoftBank committed to develop and operate 5GW of AI data-centre capacity in France, an investment of up to €75bn, with a first phase of roughly €45bn delivering 3.1GW in the Hauts-de-France region. It was the centrepiece of the Choose France summit, where companies pledged some €93bn across 71 projects, with the government putting the job figure above 15,600. SoftBank is not alone. Brookfield, the Canadian asset manager, is adding to its French data-centre spending, and Gulf money has been circling the same sector. Macron's line, that the projects would make France "by far the leading country hosting data centres" and computing capacity in Europe, is the claim the pledges are meant to underwrite. The vulnerability is in the verbs. These are commitments and plans, multi-year and conditional, and the gap between an announced €75bn and a built and running 5GW is where AI infrastructure promises tend to thin out. Power connections, planning, and the shifting economics of the AI build-out can all slow a pledge or shrink it, which is the sense in which the legacy hangs on funding that is, in the framing of the reporting, fickle. The nuclear argument is the part Macron can make on his own terms. France generates the bulk of its electricity from nuclear reactors, which gives it both abundant power and a low-carbon story to tell data-centre operators weighing where to build, at a moment when grid capacity is the binding constraint on the industry. It is the one structural advantage in the pitch that does not depend on a foreign balance sheet. The convening power, at least, is real. Sam Altman is attending at Macron's invitation, a sign of the access France can offer even where the capital is someone else's. Hosting the G7 hands him a stage, and the AI agenda lets him use it, but a summit communiqué and a built gigawatt are different things, and only one of them is in his gift. Whether the summit converts attention into the built capacity Macron has promised is the thing the next few years, not the next few days, will decide. For now he has the pledges, the venue, and the electricity. The construction is what is still to come.

Macron's G7 legacy hangs on fickle AI funding and data centers

With less than a year left in office, Emmanuel Macron wants to be remembered as the French president who put Europe back in the technology race. His decade-old ambition to turn France into a "startup nation" never fully delivered. Now Macron sees a second chance by positioning France as Europe's artificial intelligence powerhouse, leveraging the nation's abundant supply of nuclear energy for data centers. He convinced SoftBank Group to invest as much as €75 billion ($87 billion) in French projects. His advisers have dubbed the AI effort "Project Marengo," a reference to Napoleon Bonaparte's victory over an Austrian army in 1800 at the battle of the same name, won through speed and decisive action. Marengo was also a political victory, securing Bonaparte's hold on power. The stakes for Macron this late in his rule are more about legacy. As France grapples with rising unemployment and public debt that has swelled during his presidency, Macron could use a win. The Group of Seven summit in the French Alpine resort of Evian from Monday to Wednesday offers him one of his last opportunities on the global stage to showcase his technological ambitions. "For Macron, who has pitched himself as a modern president since 2017, it's also a matter of symbol," said Sylvain Bersinger, a Paris-based economics consultant. Yet with the economics of data centers unclear and a presidential election looming next year, "the issue here is political uncertainty," he said. Many of his likely successors "will likely claim to throw Macron's legacy through the window." Macron's pro-business agenda of corporate tax cuts, labor-market reform and streamlined procedures for industrial projects was halted when he called snap elections two years ago, and lost his majority in the lower house of parliament. Promoting France as an AI hub has thus become central to his economic narrative, particularly as his broader effort to "reindustrialize" the country has largely failed. Macron has invited a group of technology executives including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind to a lunch on the summit's final day, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal planning. Entrepreneurs from the U.K., Japan, India and Germany are due to attend along with French tech champion Mistral AI, with the goal to demonstrate alternatives to the U.S. giants. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's policy chief, said Macron was one of the first world leaders to treat generative AI differently than prior tech waves, such as social media, and marshal public resources into the sector. The executive, who is also attending the G7 event, praised the French president for his AI summit last year, a policy event Macron refashioned from focusing on safety to "AI Action." "It fundamentally changed the conversation in Europe," said Lehane. "And I believe he's approaching the G7 in a similar vein." Ahead of the summit, Macron will join Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an AI-focused gathering in Nice on the French Riviera. The event builds on Macron's efforts to deepen technological ties with India, which have become a key pillar of his strategy to diversify away from the U.S. and China. Last year, Macron hosted Modi for the AI summit in Paris, where he unveiled €109 billion in investment commitments aimed at helping Europe compete with U.S. President Donald Trump's Stargate infrastructure project. Among them was a pledge from MGX, a United Arab Emirates fund, in an agreement Macron personally negotiated with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed. One year on, the project's projected capacity was just doubled to 3GW. Macron has also made attracting Indian students to France a priority. For years, the French president has argued that Europe must avoid becoming a "vassal" of the U.S., yet France remains heavily dependent on American technology. Even the French intelligence service relies on U.S. software providers including Palantir Technologies, the Florida-based data analytics and AI company chaired by Peter Thiel. The data centers built in France will likely rely on U.S. chips and cloud services. Still, Macron can tout his early belief in the sector's promise, and France's ability to capitalize on it. France's AI strategy, unveiled in 2018, the year after he took office, "stemmed from President Macron's intuition that France had everything," said Clara Chappaz, the country's AI envoy, who lists mathematicians, carbon-free nuclear energy and a growing startup sector. The French president has sought to cultivate domestic champions, personally welcoming French AI pioneer Yann LeCun back to Paris after his departure from Meta Platforms to launch a startup. Mistral, launched three years ago by ex-Google and Meta scientists, has become Europe's best and perhaps only shot at competing with the likes of OpenAI and China's DeepSeek. Macron weighed in to encourage France's top corporate companies to partner with its AI champion. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch is a frequent visitor to the Elysee, and a central player in Macron's push to establish France on the AI map. In Europe, Germany's AI champion, Aleph Alpha, was bought by Canada's Cohere, meaning France is competing principally with the U.K. But where London has a high concentration of research, AI jobs and offices of U.S. big tech firms, France's energy grid and supply of cheaper power is proving to be a defining asset. OpenAI said in April that it was pausing its data center project in the U.K., citing energy costs and regulation, much to the chagrin of the British government. France was Europe's top destination for foreign investment in 2025 in terms of projects for the seventh consecutive year, ahead of the U.K. and Germany, according to consultancy EY, boosted by energy, defense and AI -- albeit the U.K. was No. 1 for jobs created. Yet the future of France's AI promise remains uncertain. French law prevents Macron from seeking a third term in 2027, and no clear successor has emerged. Two former prime ministers from his political camp are positioning themselves to inherit his movement, while parties on the center-left continue to debate how to unite behind a candidate. Further to the left, Jean-Luc Melenchon has called for the "decolonization of technology" from U.S. influence. Polls suggest that the right-wing National Rally, or RN, is likely to reach the presidential runoff whether represented by Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella. The party has supported measures to simplify permitting and accelerate data-center construction, and has recently courted business leaders, but investors remain unclear how it would approach the broader investment climate in government. "The difficulty with the RN is that they often change their mind, one day being pro tech, and the next being protectionist and slamming globalization," said Bersinger. There are other reasons for caution. Last year, cloud-computing startup Fluidstack pledged €10 billion to build a major supercomputing facility in France before abandoning the project. A planned investment by U.S. chipmaker GlobalFoundries never progressed despite substantial public subsidies. SoftBank's ability to rally the financing for its many AI commitments is another unknown. Meanwhile, resistance is beginning to emerge at the local level. Data centers require vast amounts of electricity and water for cooling, can pressure local housing markets and, critics argue, generate relatively few jobs compared with traditional industrial projects. Questions are growing about competition for energy resources. The three sites in northern France envisioned under SoftBank's plans would together require nearly twice the output of the most modern French nuclear plant. Macron has sought to address those concerns, pledging back in 2022 that state-owned utility EDF would build up to 14 new reactors. Four years later, all his efforts are poised to yield a lasting legacy, or turn into yet another unfulfilled promise.