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French President Emmanuel Macron announced for 109 billion euros in investment in artificial intelligence in France in the coming years, while Europe is looking for a larger foot in the fast growing industry dominated by the States -Unis and China.
Macron praised the new funding before the AI action summit in Paris which begins on Monday, featuring discussions between world leaders and IA leaders such as Sam Altman of Openai.
He came after US President Donald Trump last month, praised an AI infrastructure project of $ 500 billion called StargateTo be built in America and directed by Openai and SoftBank.
Large Google technology groups, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have aligned $ 300 billion this year for capital expenses related to AI.
Meanwhile, Chinese groups such as Deepseek make enormous progress in the development of competitive and low cost models, while Huawei invests massively in the construction of fleas that can compete with those of the Nvidia market leader.
Faced with such competition, “Europe and France must accelerate their investments,” France 2 television told Macron on Sunday.
To this end, France will announce on Monday that companies have agreed to invest 109 billion euros in AI projects in the country in the coming years.
“This is the equivalent of France of what the United States has announced for Stargate,” said Macron.
This decision highlights Macron’s determination that France and Europe are part of the global race to develop and market advanced technology.
An investment in France will come from the United Arab Emirates, which said last week that it will invest up to 50 billion euros in a new campus for data centers.
The initial funding will come from the MGX fund of Abu Dhabi, an investment vehicle of $ 100 billion also involved in Stargate, while a consortium of French companies would join later.
On Sunday, the director of Canadian assets Brookfield also announced an investment of 20 billion euros to support the deployment of AI infrastructure in France.
Another result of the Paris Summit will be the creation of a non -profit investment fund called AI Currently which aims to “the AI of public interest”, such as the creation of anonymized and anonymized health data for AI projects. Some 400 million euros have been promised to a fundraiser for five years of 2.5 billion euros.
European start-ups have long delayed their American and Chinese counterparts while they are facing a difficult battle due to insufficient funding, access to calculation power and a lack of clarity on the way to apply regulations.
For Macron, the summit is an opportunity to show that France can always exercise a soft power over major global problems such as AI.
He pleaded for Europe to develop its own AI platforms and applications, so as not to count solely on American and Chinese innovations for a technology that will affect so many commercial, consumers and company areas.
In particular, it was a cheerleader of the start-up of the AI based in Paris, Mistral, one of the only important manufacturers of a large language model in Europe, with its director general Arthur Mensch should Be a star from the summit for the French.
Macron and other leaders, such as the first co-host of India, Narendra Modi, should plead for more “open” platforms, shared such as those built by Mistral and Deepseek, as opposed to closed alternatives Made by Openai and Google.
Yann Lecun, AI chief scientist at META and an eminent French researcher, said that American companies with closed models “have a superiority complex that is lost”, adding: “The open world catches up with them”.
Additional report by Ivan Levingston in London, Henry Foy and Barbara Moens in Brussels
