France is committed to AI, says president Macron

French president Emmanuel Macron wants Europe to take a leading role in the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

Speaking at the VivaTech conference in Paris on 11 June, the president hailed the announcement of a partnership between French AI startup Mistral AI and AI chip giant Nvidia.

The partnership will see Mistral AI create a cloud platform, dubbed Mistral Compute, which aims to rival those from other cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, presenting a European option for the first time.

The move is a strategic shift for the two-year old company, which has previously only developed AI models. The platform will be launched in early 2026 and will be powered by Nvidia processors.

Macron said this will create an historical shift, and called it “our fight for sovereignty, for strategic autonomy”, adding: “It creates the capacity for us to scale, but also the capacity to build actual French and European offers. This is a gamechanger because it will allow us to increase our sovereignty and to do much more than we are.  

“We want to make sure that we will be working with European solutions. We still want to cooperate with the Chinese, American, Korean solutions, but we want to be sure that we will choose this cooperation, not be dependent on them.”

He urged French and European companies to get on board with the cloud platform: “This is European content – solutions produced here on European soil, tech that is here, that is operated here with our talents and that sells its services internationally.”

The aim is for the cloud platform to allow organisations to quickly develop and deploy AI, using optimised AI models from Mistral AI, accelerating the adoption of agentic AI.

Nvidia itself is scaling up its entire European market, not only in France but in other countries, including Germany and the UK, where it will be expanding its technology centre.

It is also working with the UK financial services regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), to enable finance firms to test AI safely in what it calls a Supercharged Sandbox.

The testing environment was first mooted in April, when the FCA said it planned to offer a service where companies under its watch can test out AI tools before they go live.

Any financial services firm looking to innovate and experiment with AI can participate in the Supercharged Sandbox, with access to data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up their innovation, the FCA said.

Nvidia is working with cloud partners Nebius and Nscale. During London Tech week, they announced the first phase of plans to deploy 14,000 Nvidia Blackwell Ggraphics processing units (GPUs) to power new datacentres in the UK.

In Germany, the company is working with partners to build the world’s first industrial AI cloud for manufacturers.