President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a record €93 billion in investment pledges at his Choose France summit on Monday, as a clutch of global corporations, led by Japan’s SoftBank, committed to sprawling artificial intelligence and data-centre projects that will reshape the country’s digital landscape. The figure, announced at the Palace of Versailles before some 200 executives, eclipses the €87 billion amassed across the previous eight editions of the gathering – a stark illustration of how the race to build AI infrastructure is redrawing the map of foreign direct investment.

The summit, a fixture of the Macron era since 2018, has evolved from a charm offensive into a high-stakes bidding war for post-Brexit capital. This year’s pledges were dominated by SoftBank, whose founder Masayoshi Son had signalled over the weekend a €75 billion commitment to AI infrastructure in France; on Monday, Macron cited €45 billion of that as captured by the summit. Canadian asset manager Brookfield added a $10 billion data centre for the northern Escaudain area, while Ikea’s French arm announced a more modest €35 million plan to open compact city-centre stores – a sign of how the l’Élysée is packaging everything from digital sovereign capabilities to high-street retail as a “Choose France” proposition.

Viewed from Washington, the French summit underscores a broader European thrust to secure independent AI and cloud capacity, as the transatlantic technology race intensifies. London-based analysts note that while the UK has struggled to match the coherence of Macron’s investment pitch – its own summit in 2024 was overshadowed by fiscal uncertainty – the French model offers lessons in combining state-led industrial strategy with presidential stagecraft. Asian investors, meanwhile, are using France as a European beachhead: SoftBank’s pivot towards French data centres reflects both the country’s nuclear-powered energy grid and its flexible regulatory environment for experimenting with AI.

The 15,000 jobs attached to the investments hint at an employment dividend, but seasoned observers caution that summit pledges do not always translate into shovel-ready projects. Previous Choose France editions saw a conversion rate that, while respectable, left gaps between balloons and bricks. Yet with global capital flows increasingly tilting towards AI, the Élysée can claim to have positioned France as an indispensable node in the infrastructure that will underpin the next decade’s technological competition. Whether that bet pays off will depend less on Versailles pomp and more on the capacity of regional authorities to clear planning hurdles and train the workforce that the incoming billions demand.