France is making strides in AI technology, aiming for the stars – DW – 05/24/2024

French President Emmanuel Macron was beaming with joy during a press conference with Microsoft president Brad Smith held on the sidelines of a special investment summit in Paris earlier in May. The US software giant had just announced additional investments of €4 billion ($4.3 billion) in data centers and the artificial intelligence (AI) sector in France by 2027.

“[Microsoft’s new] data centre will be one of Europe’s biggest and help us be one of the data storage and AI leaders,” Macron claimed.

Last summer, France published a national AI strategy with €500 million to be invested in the creation of AI clusters by 2030. A few months later, in December, Paris startup Mistral AI joined the league of AI champions by becoming a so-called unicorn in the sector — companies valued at more than $1 billion.

Noah Greene from the AI Safety and Stability Project at Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) says the French government “flipped a switch” when it decided to become an AI champion. But making that ambition a reality might be an uphill struggle, he told DW.

With the United States being the clear AI market leader, and China coming second ahead of the UK, the backlog of EU leaders France and Germany was not only down to technological factors, he said. “The US has been at the top of the game for so long that investors prefer to put their money here, as they know the institutional talent and infrastructure already exist.”

France meanwhile has a “very complex labor code and large US tech firms like Google have struggled at times to get past these laws,” he added.