As the US and China race ahead in AI, France carves its own path with Nvidia’s help

Nvidia bets almost $10 billion in Europe as Paris pushes for AI sovereignty. American Artificial intelligence giant Nvidia is spending big in France with a string of new investments in its technology and health companies, showing how Paris is safeguarding its technological sovereignty amid the AI race between China and the United States. On Tuesday, Nvidia announced planned investments in medical booking website Doctolib, robotics company Genesis AI, chemicals and materials company Entalpic and enterprise software company Pigment. The company says it brings its investments to Europe to nearly $10 billion (€9 bn) to the continent’s technology ecosystem. Nvidia’s investments in France show how the country’s push, driven in particular by President Emmanuel Macron, to lead in technology has grown since the AI Action Summit in February 2025 and the ‘Choose France’ summits. But AI sovereignty, which the European Commission defines as “Europe's ability to act independently in the digital world by developing and controlling key technologies,” depends heavily on infrastructure, which is currently being built in Western France. The French AI structures Taiwan’s Foxconn and French computing firm Bull announced in June they would partner to build powerful AI computers in Europe to power the continent's fast-growing network of AI factories, the large-scale computing centres that form the backbone of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Foxconn initially manufactures or tests the components in its facilities in Czechia before final assembly, rack integration and validation take place at the newly opened Angers plant in Western France. Foxconn will provide the AI factory infrastructure while Nvidia provides the latest AI chips. Additionally, from 2028, Bull will manufacture systems based on the powerful NVIDIA Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 rack-scale AI supercomputer in Angers. Nvidia’s CEO and founder Jensen Huang said at Davos in January that AI is "exciting for Europe" because of its "incredibly strong manufacturing base" for building AI infrastructure. Huang described this as Europe's moment to "leapfrog" the software era and also called robotics a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" for the continent. The CEO describes AI as a five-layer cake that includes energy, chips, infrastructure, data centre servers and the AI models and applications. “Nvidia is trying to help everyone across that cake, all the layers, work together and progress together,” Nat Ives, Nvidia’s director of enterprise for Benelux, France & Nordics, told Euronews Next in June. He said that “comes home to roost in France in particular,” as France has nuclear renewable power, which is cheaper and more sustainable, as well as having the French multinational electric utility company EDF, which is owned by the French government. The open weight debate Another key announcement from Nvidia was its commitment to open-weight AI models, which means the numerical parameters are publicly released and allow anyone to download, run and modify them. The race over open-weight AI, in which a model's parameters can be downloaded and run by anyone, has taken on a geopolitical edge. Chinese developers have set the pace, while many American companies, such as OpenAI, keep their most capable systems closed. Meanwhile, the debate over safety has grown since AI agents have been found to go rogue and hack websites. Nvidia said its own open models, called Nemotron, are now in production at French organisations that need “sovereign, trustworthy data”. The company announced a big deployment in government. The workplace software platform called Twake.ai, built by French companies Linagora and Docaposte, has been chosen as the only officially recommended “sovereign” digital workplace for more than 2,500 French public organisations. Here, sovereign will mean the data stays under French and European control rather than with foreign tech giants. Additionally, in banking, a company called SBS is launching a platform that lets banks run AI tools, including AI agents that can carry out tasks on their own, inside their own systems. NVIDIA is working with SBS on the project. It is not Nvidia’s first open-weight venture in France. In March, it partnered with French AI champion Mistral, which introduced its open-weight Mistral Large 4 in private preview last week. France appears to be betting that sovereignty does not mean building everything alone, but rather with key partners across continents. With cheaper energy and its abundance of talent, it could forge its own path as China and the US battle it out.