France eyes billions of investment in AI

France holds a foreign investment summit on Monday with tens of billions of dollars of capital already offered, notably for artificial intelligence and data centres.

Some 200 top executives from around the world are expected at Versailles palace west of Paris for President Emmanuel Macron’s annual “Choose France” event.

The 2025 conference set a record of 20 billion euros ($23.3 billion) in announced projects.

Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank said at the weekend it will spend 75 billion euros on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Its founder, Masayoshi Son, is to meet Macron at the Elysee palace on Monday.

According to business daily Les Echos, Canadian asset manager Brookfield is to announce $10 billion of investment in a data centre in the Escaudain area of northern France.

Investment firm Ardian and Nordic data platform Verne will put $5 billion into a data centre in the Paris region, it added.

Taiwanese group Foxconn is expected to invest 120 million euros in the western city of Angers for a production line for motherboards dedicated to AI in partnership with French supercomputer specialist Bull, sources told AFP.

The conference could also see announcements on rare earths.

Since the first “Choose France” in 2018, a year after Macron came to power, more than 230 projects have been announced, representing some 87 billion euros and several thousand jobs, according to the Elysee.

France has attracted the most foreign investment in Europe for seven straight years, according to the consultancy EY, but Macron said it “does not come out of thin air”.

EY said France attracted 852 projects last year out of 5,026 recorded in 47 European countries — a 17 percent drop in a difficult international environment.

The country has notably attracted more projects linked to AI than anywhere else in Europe but industry has suffered, particularly the cars, chemical and metallurgy sectors.

Economist Sylvain Bersinger said the announcements in Versailles “must not obscure the fact that overall corporate investment in France is depressed, that reindustrialisation remains more of a pious wish than a reality, and that France does not necessarily appear more attractive for foreign investors than its neighbours”.

Macron wants to make France a world leader in AI and has announced 1.55 billion euros of public investment to develop quantum technologies and semiconductors.