Macron’s G7 Legacy Hangs on Fickle AI Funding and Data Centers

With less than a year left in office, Emmanuel Macron wants to be remembered as the French president who put Europe back in the technology race.

His decade-old ambition to turn France into a “startup nation” never fully delivered. Now Macron sees a second chance by positioning France as Europe’s artificial-intelligence powerhouse, leveraging the nation’s abundant supply of nuclear energy for data centers. He convinced Softbank Group Corp. to invest as much as €75 billion ($86 billion) in French projects.

Emmanuel Macron during the ‘Nvidia GTC’ meeting at the VivaTech conference in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Photographer: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg

His advisers have dubbed the AI effort “Project Marengo,” a reference to Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory over an ...