PARIS, May 30 (Reuters) – Japan’s SoftBank Group will invest €45 billion over the next five years in a push to build up artificial intelligence infrastructure in France, the company announced on Saturday.
SoftBank said the investment, described as the biggest of its kind so far in Europe, would be made in the northern Hauts-de-France region and deliver 3.1 GW of capacity.
The investment plans are due to be formally announced on Monday at the annual Choose France business conference.
French engineering company Schneider Electric said it would be one of the project’s key partners and equip the sites with its modules without disclosing financials.
Three sites, including one in Dunkirk, are expected to come into operation by 2031.
Additional sites spread across France are planned further down the road, SoftBank said, pushing the overall planned investment sum to €75 billion.
“The fact that the country is a producer and exporter of energy is absolutely decisive for investments in AI infrastructure,” SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son told the paper La Tribune du Dimanche.
State-owned nuclear energy giant EDF is also part of the deal, handing one of its former power plants over to SoftBank to transform the site into a data centre.
The French commitment adds to a global AI infrastructure spending spree by SoftBank. Its investments in AI also include over $30 billion invested in OpenAI so far, for about an 11% stake.
France has been using the Choose France summit to court foreign investors since it was launched by President Emmanuel Macron in 2018.
(reporting by Tassilo HummelEditing by Tomasz Janowski and Franklin Paul)
