President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that he was expecting foreign investments amounting to 93 billion euros ($108 billion) at a conference dubbed "Choose France", including on artificial intelligence and data centers. Money already pledged as part of his annual investment meeting would surpass the sum of 87 billion euros raised over the past eight years combined, he said. "This edition of Choose France alone will make it possible to crystallize a record amount of 93 billion euros in confirmed investments, for more than 15,000 jobs. It is obviously by far a record edition, and it is historic," Macron said. This year's pledges include 45 billion euros from Japanese tech investor SoftBank, Macron said. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, said over the weekend that the money would be spent by 2031 on data centers in northern France. They would also be spent on "artificial intelligence, on data centers" as well as semiconductors, critical minerals, tractors and trucks, steel and healthcare, the president said. Macron said these projects would make it possible "to make France by far the leading country hosting data centers" and "computing capacity in Europe", as well as a "forward base for the production of AI robots, and for industrialization through AI". "We are clearly in the process of closing the gap we had in terms of computing capacity in Europe," compared with the United States and China, he added.
