The AI Race Is Moving to Europe

Ronni Holmvig Strøm · 2026-05-31

On Saturday, from Paris, SoftBank announced that it would commit up to €75 billion, roughly $87 billion, to build five gigawatts of AI data center capacity in France. The headline traveled the way these headlines now do, as a very large number attached to a very large machine. The number is the

On Saturday, from Paris, SoftBank announced that it would commit up to €75 billion, roughly $87 billion, to build five gigawatts of AI data center capacity in France. The headline traveled the way these headlines now do, as a very large number attached to a very large machine.

The number is the least interesting part. SoftBank did not buy €75 billion of anything in particular. It promised to deliver gigawatts, and the gigawatt, not the euro, is the currency that now governs where artificial intelligence is allowed to exist.

Measured in Gigawatts

For most of the last decade the limiting reagent in AI was clear enough. First data, then chips, then the capital to buy the chips. Each of those constraints has loosened. Capital is abundant and impatient.

Chips are still scarce. The constraint that has moved to the front is power, and not power in the abstract. Firm power. Electricity that is there at three in the morning in February, deliverable to a specific substation, permitted by a government that wants the build to happen.

This is why SoftBank's commitment reads as a power-purchase ambition. The company said the goal was to "develop and operate" up to five gigawatts of capacity. The first phase, a €45 billion tranche, targets 3.1 gigawatts in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, with sites at Dunkirk, Bosquel, and Bouchain.

Five gigawatts is closer to the continuous output of five large reactors, dedicated to machines that think on our behalf. When the unit of measure for a software industry becomes the gigawatt, the industry has changed category. It is now an industrial concern, subject to the physics and the politics of electricity.

France Is Selling Electrons

The question is why France, specifically. The official answer arrived in the language of summitry. France's economy minister called the announcement a "testament to President Emmanuel Macron's ambition to position France as a leading destination all along the AI value chain." The deal will be formally staged at the Choose France Summit, which is what such summits are for.

France runs the largest nuclear fleet in Europe, which gives it something most of its neighbors and most of the United States cannot offer at scale. A deep supply of low-carbon baseload that is already built, already permitted, and already paid for in the political sense.

The state utility EDF has begun selling that advantage directly. Last year the operator Data4 signed a twelve-year nuclear production allocation contract with EDF for forty megawatts drawn straight from the reactors. A small figure, but it establishes the template. Nuclear electricity sold by the decade, to a data center, as a product.

France put roughly three gigawatts of site capacity out to tender after the Paris AI Action Summit. The SoftBank commitment lands on top of that groundwork.