All eyes were on French President Emmanuel Macron Sunday at the end of the first day of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris after he announced a €109 billion investment package (around $112 billion at current exchange rates) in the French AI ecosystem.
He reiterated this financial commitment from private partners willing to build data centers in France (mostly) and invest in AI startups (sometimes). According to him, the main reason why international investors are choosing France for their next massive data center project comes down to the country’s oversupply of nuclear energy.
“I have a good friend on the other side of the ocean saying ‘drill, baby, drill.’ Here, there is no need to drill, it’s just ‘plug, baby, plug,’” Macron said.
But he doesn’t want to make the AI Action Summit all about France. “For me, this summit is not just the announcement of a lot of investment in France. It’s a wake-up call for a European strategy,” he said.
“Tomorrow, President Van der Leyen will announce the European AI strategy and it will be a very important occasion. But this strategy will be a unique opportunity for Europe to accelerate, to simplify our regulations, to deepen the single market and to invest as well in computing capacities,” he added.
As the European Union wants to streamline regulation, Macron also seems to back this line of thinking. “It’s very clear that we have to synchronize with the rest of the world in terms of transmission, in terms of permitting, in terms of authorization, clinical trials — I mean, in all the different sectors.”
Macron also urged European companies to buy from European startups. According to him, most companies in the U.S. and China favor homegrown solutions. But that’s rarely the case in Europe, especially when it comes to technology.
On Tuesday, global leaders and tech CEOs will unveil a new statement. Many will scrutinize both the content and the list of countries signing the pledge at the end of the summit to see if it’s still possible to agree on a list of priorities when it comes to AI regulation.
Read our full coverage of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris.
Romain Dillet is a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch. He has written over 3,000 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, privacy, security, fintech, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With twelve years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry. In fact, his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover N26, Revolut and DigitalOcean. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.
