France secured $59bn in AI infrastructure commitments at the Choose France summit, split between a $50bn buildout from SoftBank and more than $9bn from Nebius. The SoftBank deal alone could expand to $83bn. The numbers make the UK's AI investment story look modest.
President Macron has spent two years positioning France as Europe's AI infrastructure leader, leveraging one asset the UK cannot match: a nuclear-powered grid that provides low-carbon, low-cost electricity at scale. SoftBank's planned 3.1-gigawatt data centre buildout in northern France is designed to exploit that advantage. AI data centres are constrained by power before anything else, and France has surplus clean electricity that the UK does not.
Nuclear provides roughly 70% of France's electricity. That gives the country stable, cheap, low-carbon power in volumes no other European nation can offer. SoftBank's decision to build in Dunkirk, Bosquel and Bouchain rather than the UK or Germany is a direct consequence of that structural advantage.
"AI is entering a new era, and the countries that build the infrastructure for this transformation will shape the future of technology, industry and society," SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said.
He chose France.
The UK comparison
Britain has attracted real investment. Microsoft committed $30bn to expand its UK cloud and AI footprint from 2025 to 2028. Google pledged $6.3bn, including a data centre in Hertfordshire. Vantage Data Centers is backing a $12.6bn AI Growth Zone in South Wales. The government launched a $630m Sovereign AI Fund in April 2026.
The problem is scale. France's February 2025 AI package totalled $122bn when private-sector commitments were included. The UK Sovereign AI Fund represents roughly 0.6% of that figure. Even accounting for the different structures, with France bundling private commitments into a headline number that flatters the total, the gap is real.
The UK grid is constrained, and data centre operators face connection delays measured in years. The government's AI Growth Zones are designed to accelerate planning and grid access, but the power gap with France is structural, not administrative, and it will not close in the timeframe that matters.
London has the ecosystem. Paris has the megawatts
Dealroom's 2026 Global Tech Ecosystem Index, published last week, showed London reclaiming the top spot in Europe after Paris overtook it in 2024. London tech companies raised $17.7bn last year, with AI investment almost doubling to $7bn. The city is home to 138 unicorns. Anthropic and OpenAI have both expanded their UK presence. DeepMind, the most important AI research lab in Europe, remains in London. Cambridge ranks as the world's third-highest innovation density leader.
The UK is winning the ecosystem race: venture investment, startup creation, talent concentration and the presence of frontier AI labs.
France is winning the infrastructure race: physical data centres, gigawatts of power capacity, government-backed land and planning approvals. SoftBank's Dunkirk buildout and Nebius's 240-megawatt deployment are concrete, with clear milestones and committed capital.
The uncomfortable truth
Both are necessary. A thriving AI ecosystem without sufficient domestic compute capacity means the work gets done on someone else's infrastructure, in someone else's jurisdiction. Infrastructure without a strong startup ecosystem means the data centres serve foreign customers and the economic value flows out.
London wants to be where AI companies are built. Paris wants to be where AI companies run. The healthiest outcome for Europe would be both succeeding, creating a continental ecosystem with French power and British talent.
The risk is that neither achieves critical mass, and the real AI infrastructure gets built in Texas, Virginia and the Middle East while European capitals argue over who got the bigger headline number at the last summit.
For now, the scoreboard reads: brains to London, electricity to Paris. In the age of AI, the electricity might matter more.
