Canadian Investment Company Brookfield plans to invest € 20 billion by 2030 in projects The Tribune on Sunday Confirmed by a news agency AFP. Most of the amount will be used to build AI focus data centers.
This ad is the latest in a series of investment commitments, as heads of state and global technological leaders plan to gather for the Summit of Artificial Intelligence in Paris beginning on Monday.
According to the Tribune Sunday, about a € 15 billion investment from Brookfield will go to a massive data center in Cambrai in the north of France. This data center will have a capacity of up to one Gigawatt. The rest will be used for new infrastructure projects, including building new electrical production capabilities.
On Friday, France and the United Arab Emirates announced an AI -Campus project along with a large investment from up to € 50 -milardo ($ 52 billion). Again, most of the investment will go to a data center with a capacity of up to one Gigawatt.
There are two reasons why these mega investment projects are happening now. First, on January 21, Openai, SoftBank, MGG and other partners revealed the Stargate project$ 500 -billion investment program to build multiple data centers for AI in the United States
While it is Unclear How much every investor is actually ready to compromise with Stargate, this announcement – combined with the recent Mario Draghi Report About European competition has been acting as an awake call for many politicians in Europe.
Second, most of France’s electrical production comes from nuclear power plants (about 65%) and renewable sources (about 25%). It also produces more electricity than it needs. Technical companies are struggling to reduce their carbon footprint and find enough electrical capacity, so they look more and more to France as an attractive location for their powerful hungry data centers.
Other commitments of local companies
In particular, BPifrance, the Public Investment Bank of France, has announced that it is planning to invest as much as 10 billion € ($ 10.3 billion) In the AI system in France. This is not a data center project, as BPifrance mostly wants to support more AI stations and become a limited partner in VC firms specialized in AI investments. BPIFrance is already a shareholder in Mistral, H and Poolside.
Finally, Iliad, the telecommunications company founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, allocates € 3 billion to AI investments ($ 3.1 billion) with the help of financial partners, such as Infravio. About 2.5 billion € ($ 2.6 billion) will be used to build new AI focus data centers with “hundreds of megawatts of capacity.”
Scale roadCloudy Computer Company based in France, is an Iliad affiliate. So the new computer power is likely to be available through Scaleway. Some European AI companies have already used Scaleway to train their AI models, such as Mistral, H and Photome. (Interestingly, Xavier Niel is also an investor in Mistral and H.)
If you add all these investment ads, France could receive € 83 billion ($ 85 billion) in AI-related investments in the coming years, mainly related to data centers and infrastructure projects. There may be more ads in the coming days at the AI -AGO Summit in Paris.