Japanese tech investor SoftBank is investing up to 75 billion euros in the construction of new European AI data centers in France. The first of these massive computer sheds should start operating in 2031, including in Dunkirk. The emphasis is not on the use of chatbots but on artificial intelligence for industrial applications.
SoftBank announced Saturday announces that it is making its largest European AI investment round to date. There is no question of an AI bubble – excessive investments that are not recouped said Masayoshi Son, the CEO of the Japanese investment vehicle. Son also said that he was sensitive to Emmanuel Macron’s personal powers of persuasion. The French president wants to make his country a leader in AI applications, to make Europe less dependent on American technology.
The size of data centers is expressed in gigawatts (GW), the electrical power required to run computers and cooling. SoftBank wants to build a total of 5 GW of data centers, together with French companies. The first phase involves 3.1 GW, an investment of 45 billion euros, after which the aim is to expand elsewhere in France.
Until now, a lot of computing power was needed to develop and train AI models. American companies are leading the way, closely followed by their Chinese competitors. The most capable AI models from Europe come from the French Mistral AI. ASML invested 1.3 billion euros in Mistral AI last year and is one of the largest shareholders in the young company.
Now that artificial intelligence is advancing in business and the number of applications is growing, additional data centers are needed to process all AI commands. In technical terms: inference. This transition gives Europe an opportunity to build its own, independent AI infrastructure. SoftBank’s capital injection therefore seems well timed.
Stargate
For Europe, 75 billion euros in AI data centers is a record investment, although that number pales in comparison to the American mega projects. In January 2025, SoftBank announced it would invest $100 billion in Stargate. This is an ambitious AI expansion plan totaling $500 billion, which US President Trump announced at the start of his term.
StarGate must provide ChatGPT maker OpenAI with more computing power, but implementation continues with difficulty local protests against large data centers. Moreover, there are few energy facilities available to realize all the promised expansions.
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‘Buy European chips’
The EU itself started a fund of 20 billion euros for this five major AI computing centerssupplemented with money from the business community. A Dutch initiative by serial entrepreneur Han de Groot aims for such a thing ‘AI gigafactory’ near Rotterdam, with capacity for tens of thousands of fast Nvidia chips.
For the time being, European data centers will still run on American computing power, which is produced in Taiwan. But ultimately, Brussels hopes, Europe will have to make such advanced AI chips itself, which are more economical and efficient than current chip designs.
A new subsidy plan, the EU Chips Act 2.0intends to encourage Member States to purchase European-made chips. As a result, local demand for semiconductors is growing and the idea is that Asian chip manufacturers such as TSMC will want to expand further in Europe. Details of this second Chips Act will be announced soon.
