PARIS – When Masayoshi Son flew to Paris for the signing ceremony at the Elysee Palace on Monday, the paperwork already existed. Macron had travelled to Japan earlier this year to make the pitch in person. The deal had been structured over months of quiet diplomacy. What remained was the announcement – and the announcement was, by any measure, staggering.
France secured a record €93 billion ($108 billion) in foreign investment commitments at the ninth edition of the Choose France summit, President Emmanuel Macron said at Versailles on Monday, dwarfing all previous editions of the annual gathering combined. The pledges, spread across 71 projects, are expected to generate more than 15,600 jobs – at a moment when French unemployment has crept back above 8 percent, well above the European Union average.
The summit’s headline figure rests almost entirely on one bet: SoftBank Group, the Japanese technology conglomerate run by Son, has committed €45 billion to build three AI data centres in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, delivering a combined 3.1 gigawatts of computing capacity. Son said that commitment could ultimately reach €75 billion, enough to power 5 gigawatts of infrastructure – the Japan Times reported – making it SoftBank’s largest AI infrastructure commitment anywhere in Europe.
The reason Son picked France over Germany, the Netherlands, or Ireland, he said, was nuclear power. France generates roughly 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors, offering the kind of large-block baseload supply that AI data centres – among the most power-hungry structures ever built – require. Son told reporters the combination of French nuclear capacity and the stability of the national grid was decisive in the company’s calculus.
Macron framed the summit’s outcome not as an investment figure but as a geopolitical repositioning. France would become, he said, “by far the leading country hosting data centres and computing capacity in Europe” and a “forward base for the production of AI robots and for industrialisation through AI.” The United States and China, he acknowledged, had opened a substantial gap in computing infrastructure. Monday’s announcements, in his telling, were the down payment on closing it.
Whether the arithmetic holds is a separate question. The €93 billion headline aggregates confirmed pledges, phased commitments, and investment intentions that stretch, in SoftBank’s case, to 2031 and potentially beyond. Economist Sylvain Bersinger, speaking to Reuters, cautioned that the Versailles announcements must not obscure the fact that overall corporate investment in France is depressed and that reindustrialisation remains more of a pious wish than a reality. France’s EY-tracked project count fell 17 percent in 2025, even as AI-linked investment climbed.
Beyond SoftBank, the summit attracted a broader range of capital than previous editions. Canadian asset manager Brookfield pledged an additional €10 billion for AI infrastructure in northern France, on top of €20 billion committed last year. Amazon announced it would add three logistics sites and more than 1,000 jobs on top of an earlier €15 billion commitment. US firm Salesforce committed $2 billion by 2030, earmarked in part for an AI hub in Paris. Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn is expected to invest €120 million in Angers for AI-dedicated motherboard production in partnership with French supercomputer specialist Bull.
Macron also announced €1.55 billion in public investment for quantum technologies and semiconductors, two sectors where France has identified structural dependency on non-European suppliers as a national security risk. The funds will sit alongside private commitments in semiconductors, critical minerals, and electrification – sectors that featured prominently in Macron’s list of priority verticals alongside data centres and healthcare.
The trajectory of the Choose France summits reflects the scale of Macron’s long-running campaign to reframe France in the minds of global investors. Since the first edition in 2018, when Macron convened C-suite executives passing through Europe en route to Davos, the annual event at Versailles has announced some 231 projects totalling €87 billion – a cumulative figure that Monday’s single summit has already exceeded. As Reuters reported, this year’s pledges alone surpass the combined total of all eight prior editions.
Son’s own characterisation of the moment went further than any investment slide deck. Speaking alongside Macron in Paris, he described the current AI era as “probably 50 times bigger” than the dot-com boom – the biggest revolution of technology and realisation that mankind ever experienced, he told reporters, according to CNBC. That framing carried its own caveat: Son’s record as a forecaster of technological revolutions includes both the Alibaba bet of 2000, which returned tens of billions, and the WeWork commitment of 2017, which ended in bankruptcy. France is now, in material terms, one of his largest wagers yet.
What the summit did not resolve – and what Macron did not address directly – is the disconnect between headline foreign investment figures and the condition of France’s industrial base. Factory closures in the automobile, chemical, and metallurgy sectors have accelerated. Overall corporate investment remains depressed. A warning flagged earlier this month by Allianz that Europe risks falling into a structural AI dependency on US cloud infrastructure and Asian hardware remains unresolved by data centre announcements alone. Whether the infrastructure being built in northern France produces a broader industrial dividend – or simply concentrates computing capacity in the hands of one Japanese conglomerate – is the question that Versailles left open.
Son signed the SoftBank agreement at the Elysee Palace before travelling to Versailles, giving Macron his photo and the deal its formality. The data centres will not begin delivering power until 2028 at the earliest. The €75 billion ceiling is contingent on phases that extend to the early 2030s. For now, as European governments compete to secure supply chains in critical technology sectors, France holds the biggest single foreign investment pledge on the continent – and a nuclear grid that the world’s AI infrastructure builders have decided, at least for now, is worth betting on.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
