Investing.com - France is due to unveil private-sector investments worth around 109 billion euros in the country's artificial intelligence sector at an event in Paris this week, according to President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron's office noted that part of the funding includes a 20 billion-euro investment from Canadian group Brookfield, with local media reports saying much of it will be towards a data center. Separate financing is also expected to come from the United Arab Emirates, with the spending tipped to potentially reach 50 billion euros in the coming years.
The UAE has said the investment would include financing for the construction of a one gigawatt data center that would be part of a broader campus dedicated to developing AI in France.
The announcement comes as Europe faces the task of keeping up in an international race to build out AI capabilities, with the U.S. in particular currently planning to spend heavily on the nascent technology.
U.S. President Donald Trump recently unveiled a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment drive over the next four years dubbed "Stargate", which is being led by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, software firm Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), and Japanese tech investor SoftBank (TYO:9984).
Macron told French broadcaster TF1 that the AI investment pledges are the "equivalent for France" to what the U.S. has announced with Stargate.
World leaders and the heads of some of big-name companies are due to attend the Artificial Intelligence Action (WA:ACT) Summit in Paris this week, including U.S. Vice President JD Vance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) chief Sundar Pichai.
Clouding over the gathering will likely be the recent emergence of a cut-price open-source AI model from Chinese start-up DeepSeek. Although skepticism has surrounded DeepSeek's claim that the model offers similar performance to ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost, the technology has still cast doubt around massive AI spending plans being pursued by Big Tech players as well as U.S. leadership in the AI race.
(Reuters contributed reporting.)
(1 euro = $1.03)