Emmanuel Macron said his government will try to attract €109bn of private investment in AI, the Financial Times reports.
Speaking ahead of France’s AI Action Summit that opens in Paris today, he said the move would be Europe’s answer to Donald Trump’s “Stargate”, which envisages $500bn of spending in the US AI sector.
He said the aim would be to attract the investment “in the coming years”. Trump said Stargate would be carried out over the next four years of his presidency.
Macron has been an advocate for Europe’s AI effort, fearing future dependency on the US and China. Among the projects he has supported is start-up Mistral’s large language model, which is thought to be the only one in Europe.
Targeted investors could come from the UAE, American and Canadian investments funds, and might include French companies such as telecoms companies Iliad and Orange, and aerospace group Thales.
Last week, the UAE said it would invest up to €50bn in building a 1GW AI datacenter in France.
Yesterday, Canadian asset manager Brookfield announced a €20bn investment to support the deployment of AI infrastructure in France.
Another outcome of the Paris summit will be the creation of a non-profit investment fund called Current AI. This will further public-interest AI projects such as a pool of anonymised healthcare data to train AI engines.
Some €400m has been pledged towards a five-year fundraising goal of €2.5bn.
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