France preparing to invest €109B in artificial intelligence

In the upcoming years, France is willing to invest €109 billion in numerous artificial intelligence (AI) projects.

That’s what President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday, one day ahead of the global AI Action Summit in Paris. He announced the investment plans during an interview on television.

According to press agency Reuters, €20 billion is being put up by Canadian investment firm Brookfield in the next five years. Another €50 billion is being financed by the United Arab Emirates. MGX Fund Management Limited, an investment company from Abu Dhabi, would also participate in the investment project. A consortium of French companies would join later, the Financial Times says.

Among other things, the money will be used to build a new campus for AI data centers in France.

After the AI ​​Action Summit, a non-profit investment fund will be set up with a focus on ‘public interest AI’, the Financial Times continues. This fund should help develop privacy-friendly AI tools, such as the development of anonymized health data for AI projects.

At the moment, this fund is said to have raised around €400 million. The goal is to collect around €2.5 billion in the next five years.

Recently, a lot of tech companies have dedicated large sums of money to advancing the development of AI.

Meta has pledged to invest $65 billion in enlarging its AI infrastructure. Microsoft is willing to put up approximately $80 billion to build AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world. Google is planning to spend up to $75 billion to expand the company’s AI infrastructure this year.

Last month, a partnership of several American tech companies from the private sector, also called Project Stargate, committed to invest $100 billion in the creation of new AI infrastructures in the U.S., increasing to $500 billion over the next four years.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants the United Kingdom to become ‘world leader’ in AI development. “The AI industry needs a government that is on their side, one that won’t sit back and let opportunities slip through its fingers. And in a world of fierce competition, we cannot stand by. We must move fast and take action to win the global race,” he said in a statement last month.