'France's equivalent of Stargate...': Macron announces $112.5 billion private investment in AI

As countries and companies are vying for the AI pie, French President Emmanuel Macron Monday announced investments worth €109 billion ($112.5 billion) from the private sector in artificial intelligence in France over the coming years. Bulk of the investments is expected to go into building data centres. 

Drawing parallels to a $500-billion AI data centre project announced by US President Donald Trump last month, Macron said this is France's Stargate moment. "This is the equivalent for France of what the US announced for Stargate,' the president said.

The formal announcement will be made at the AI summit in Paris that will begin on Monday. "Europe and France must accelerate their investments," Macron told a local television Sunday. 

“The first battle for Europeans is to invest, invest, invest…If we regulate before we innovate, we won’t have any innovation and people will say, ‘We have great regulation in Europe, but we don’t have a single player'," Macron was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.

There is mounting pressure on the European Union as US President Trump is keenly disrupting his predecessor's guardrails to promote US competitiveness in AI and China's debut with DeepSeek AI.

The financing includes plans by Canadian investment firm Brookfield to invest 20 billion euros in AI projects in France and financing from the UAE that could hit 50 billion euros in the years ahead.

Initial financing will come from Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, a $100 billion investment vehicle also involved in Stargate, while a consortium of French companies would join later.

The Elysee Palace said the UAE investment would include financing for a 1 gigawatt data centre. The La Tribune de Dimanche newspaper reported that the bulk of Brookfield's investment would go towards a data centre.

AI requires huge amounts of energy to power massive data centres. With Europe seen struggling to meet future demand, the French move is seen as an effort to get a greater foothold in the fast-growing industry dominated by the US and China.

Big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have between them lined up around $US300 billion this year in AI-related capital expenditure.

Paris AI Summit
Heads of nations and tech leaders are convening at Paris AI Summit starting Monday to discuss how to safely embrace artificial intelligence amid a global churn spearheaded by AI. The two-day summit will be held at the Grand Palais in Paris and will be attended by over 1,500 guests, including more than 100 world leaders.

The summit will be attended by leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US Vice-President JD Vance, Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki, President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyen and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft President Brad Smith and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are scheduled to give talks at the AI Action Summit. While Elon Musk and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng have both been invited, it is yet to be clear if the duo will attend. "If we want growth, jobs and progress, we must allow innovators to innovate, builders to build and developers to develop," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an op-ed in Le Monde ahead of the summit.