France attracts $108b foreign investment

Half of capital will go to SoftBank data centres; Macron aims to make France AI leader

PARIS:

Companies have pledged to invest €93 billion ($108 billion) in France, with half destined for a SoftBank-backed data centre project, as President Emmanuel Macron seeks to leverage nuclear capacity to make the country a global AI leader.

Macron said the 71 projects being unveiled at this year's Choose France summit marked a record year for foreign investment and were expected to create more than 15,600 jobs at a time when the unemployment level, which remains higher than the EU average, has recently crept above 8%.

Japanese tech investor SoftBank will spend €45 billion to build three data centres with combined capacity of 3.1 gigawatts in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031. That investment could potentially rise to €75 billion, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said ahead of Macron's annual gathering of the global corporate elite, which was due to open at the former royal palace of Versailles later on Monday.

"It's a massive size of investment coming," Son said, adding that the project would help Europe catch up with the US and China in AI computing capacity. "We are doing that in the US already, so we have the model, we have the momentum, and we can make France the centre of Europe (for AI). And Europe needs this kind of AI technology."

The investment is the latest in SoftBank's global AI infrastructure spending spree. It has so far invested over $30 billion in OpenAI, taking an 11% stake in the ChatGPT developer, and has agreed to invest a further $30 billion in the company over the course of 2026.

It is also leading the financing of the $500 billion Stargate project to build out data centres in the United States. "The US is going fast. China is going fast. Europe, Japan, Asia have to also go fast, not to be left out," said Son, speaking at the Elysee.