SoftBank announces up to €75 billion investment to build French data centers
The Japanese technology investment group SoftBank on Friday announced an investment of up to €75 billion in France to expand artificial-intelligence data center capacity. According to TechCrunch, the company's stated goal is to develop and operate up to 5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity. The investment is regarded as one of the largest single data center commitments in the European Union's history.
The announcement was made at an Elysée event in Paris as part of President Emmanuel Macron's strategy of attracting cross-border partnerships for AI infrastructure investment. SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son said in the announcement that 'France will be the first EU country to support the infrastructure needed to become one of Europe's AI hubs'. According to TechCrunch, the first phase of the commitment is €30 billion and includes the entry into service of 2 gigawatts of capacity to be commissioned by the end of 2027.
The project's geographic distribution is designed to reflect France's nationwide energy infrastructure. The first data centers will be built outside Paris, in the Lyon and Marseille regions; these are points of dense European fibre connectivity. According to TechCrunch, SoftBank is in the final stages of negotiations with Electricité de France (EDF) for long-term energy purchase agreements. After the announcement, French EDF shares rose 4.2 percent on the Paris bourse.
French President Macron said at the ceremony that 'the first major link in the infrastructure investments we need for AI to be developed in Europe is here today'. The AI Act passed by the EU in the previous year had introduced new standards for the development of high-risk AI systems within Europe. The SoftBank investment means building data center infrastructure aligned with these standards.
The project's scale calculation is important: 5 gigawatts of capacity is equivalent to the annual energy consumption of approximately 3 million households. This capacity will be dedicated entirely to training and inference of the AI models to be served. SoftBank already has an infrastructure partnership with OpenAI and other major AI laboratories; a US-focused investment known as Stargate contains a 500-billion-dollar commitment for joint data center construction. The France investment is framed as a Europe-focused extension of the Stargate concept.
According to analysis carried by TechCrunch, the energy dimension of the investment is critical. Providing 5 gigawatts of additional electricity capacity requires adding capacity to France's existing nuclear grid. EDF's six nuclear reactors have come back into service in recent months after years of maintenance. EDF stated that, if next-generation EPR2 nuclear reactors are approved by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), additional supply could be provided for data center investment through to the 2030s.
On the financing side, SoftBank's Vision Fund will supply part of the €30 billion; for the remainder, co-investors will be included. According to TechCrunch, Mubadala Investment Authority (United Arab Emirates), the Singapore state investment fund (GIC) and Norway's sovereign wealth fund have begun discussions as co-financing sources for the investment. The co-investor structure reflects the historical difficulties SoftBank has had in bearing alone commitments of this scale.
The AI ecosystem in France is also expected to be affected by the investment. Mistral AI, LightOn and other French AI laboratories could receive prioritised access to SoftBank's new data center capacity. This is regarded as part of the strategy of reducing the European AI ecosystem's dependence on the infrastructures of US big-tech companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google). Macron said at EU meetings last year that 'Europe cannot maintain its strategic independence without its own AI infrastructure'.
The project's environmental dimension is also a subject of analysis. 5 gigawatts of data center capacity require an annual energy generation equivalent to approximately 130 million tonnes of CO2. However, approximately 75 percent of France's electricity mix comes from nuclear; for that reason the carbon intensity of these data centers is significantly lower than that of other European countries with fossil-heavy grids. Greenpeace France director Jean-François Julliard said to TechCrunch that 'nuclear-dependent data centers can be considered as an alternative to coal-dependent data centers, but water consumption and waste-heat issues are still present'.
This article is not investment advice. Investors and sector professionals should assess the implications of the SoftBank investment for their decisions with their own financial advisers. Over the next six months, the start date of the project's first data center construction and the regulatory approvals under the EU AI Act can be followed. TechCrunch's coverage emphasises that the project's completion will take approximately 8 to 10 years and that during this period it will shape the transformation of the European AI ecosystem.