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

Nvidia, the leading artificial intelligence company, is making significant investments in France to bolster its presence in the technology sector amid the intense competition between China and the United States. The company's investments in France total nearly $10 billion (€9bn) to the continent's technology ecosystem. These investments include partnerships with medical booking website Doctolib, robotics company Genesis AI, chemicals and materials company Entalpic, and enterprise software company Pigment.

France's push for technological leadership has gained momentum since the AI Action Summit in February 2025 and the 'Choose France' summits, driven primarily by President Emmanuel Macron. The country's AI structures are currently being built in Western France, with Taiwan's Foxconn and French computing firm Bull announcing a partnership to build powerful AI computers in Europe. Nvidia will provide the latest AI chips, while Foxconn will handle manufacturing and testing.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the significance of Europe's manufacturing base for AI infrastructure, calling it Europe's moment to "leapfrog" the software era. He also emphasized robotics as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the continent. Nvidia's CEO described AI as a five-layer cake, consisting of energy, chips, infrastructure, data center servers, and AI models and applications.

Nvidia aims to help all layers of this cake progress together, particularly in France, which boasts nuclear renewable power and the French multinational electric utility company EDF.

One of Nvidia's key announcements was its commitment to open-weight AI models, which allows anyone to download, run, and modify the numerical parameters. This move has taken on a geopolitical edge as Chinese developers have been leading the race, while many American companies, such as OpenAI, keep their most capable systems closed.

Nvidia's open models, called Nemotron, are in production at French organizations that require sovereign, trustworthy data. A notable deployment is in government, where Twake.ai, a workplace software platform built by French companies Linagora and Docaposte, will be the only officially recommended "sovereign" digital workplace for over 2,500 French public organizations.

Additionally, Nvidia is working with SBS on a platform that enables banks to run AI tools, including AI agents that can carry out tasks independently, within their own systems.