The race to build Europe’s artificial intelligence future sets up a home in Paris this week, as the city’s flagship tech conference VivaTech becomes a magnet for global technology giants who see France as a key to building AI on the continent.
The event has grown from a 45,000-person gathering into Europe’s largest startup and tech conference, drawing over 200,000 attendees from 170 countries. This year, it carries more geopolitical weight than ever, with AI sovereignty and infrastructure dominating the agenda.
Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn and French computing firm Bull announced a partnership on Thursday to build powerful AI computers in Europe to power the continent’s fast-growing network of AI factories, the large-scale computing centres that form the backbone of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
“France is one of the biggest countries in Europe with quite a lot of talent… We also know that France is very good at high-tech and especially in the space industry,” Foxconn’s vice president and spokesperson James Wu told Euronews Next.
“France has very great ambitions in solving AI projects and we believe we can create a very important role to help France achieve that goal,” he added.
Components will be manufactured and tested at Foxconn’s facilities in the Czech Republic before final assembly and validation at Bull’s factory in Angers, France. The servers are targeted at cloud providers and the growing market of AI factories across Europe.
The announcement was made at VivaTech in Paris, marking Foxconn’s first appearance at the show.
Alongside the Nvidia-powered AI server news, the company displayed two electric vehicles, one of which had a massage chair, and a wheeled humanoid robot capable of performing precision assembly tasks.
The Foxconn-Bull deal is part of a wider surge of AI infrastructure investment in Europe anchored by Nvidia.
At last year’s VivaTech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang committed to building more than 20 AI factories across Europe and named Mistral AI as the continent’s sovereign-compute champion.
This year, Nvidia and Mistral AI announced the creation of Mistral Compute, a sovereign AI infrastructure and GPU cloud platform project designed specifically for Europe.
Why France is attractive to AI giants
Under French President Emmanuel Macron, the country has positioned itself as startup nation and a serious contender in AI.
France is at a unique advantage over other European countries in that its energy source is much cheaper, as it relies on nuclear, which was attractive to Foxconn.
“Today we talk about AI computing capacity as a power, but utility actually is fundamental for computing power. So I think France has a very good advantage in the power structures… especially with a lot coming from nuclear, which is very stable as a supply,” Wu said.
“I believe for those advanced countries to generate new energy to fulfil the demand for the AI era, France definitely has a very, very good advantage here,” he said, adding that France was also at an advantage as it has a “determination to develop the AI industry”.
Wu said that it was not just the AI server rack that powers AI factories that the company is bringing to France, but also the potential to boost the country’s entire AI ecosystem from electric vehicles to smartphones and PC’s, all of which require AI-embedded technology.
Foxconn will provide the AI factory infrastructure while the US giant Nvidia provides the latest AI chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang this month described AI as a five-layer cake that includes energy, chips, infrastructure, data centre servers and the AI models and applications.
“Nvidia is trying to help everyone across that cake, all the layers, work together and progress together,” Nat Ives, Nvidia’s director of enterprise for Benelux, France & Nordics, told Euronews Next.
He said that “comes home to roost in France in particular,” as France has the French multinational electric utility company EDF, which is owned by the government of France, nuclear power and renewable power.
“When I look at the work that goes into deciding where data centres should be and when people are contracting with data centres, the sustainability and the carbon impact or lack of is a really massive part of the process,” Ives said.
The planning is increasingly shaped by Nvidia’s own environmental commitments. The company powered all of its global offices and data centres with renewable electricity.
Its latest Blackwell chip architecture also delivers up to 25 times lower energy consumption for AI tasks compared to the previous generation.
France is at another advantage with its AI champions, including Mistral AI, AMI, H Company, as well as software providers and builders, and has a strong history of talent that rises through the universities, he added.
“Those model builders in Europe have a massive role to play and I’m pleased to say that I’ve known Mistral guys since they were like three guys in a coffee shop and even before they were Mistral, and we’ve worked with them all the way through,” Ives said.
These open-source and open-science companies that allow access to AI for organisations or developers that lack the means to pay for other closed-source companies, such as OpenAI, help promote a more equal playing field.
“So we’ve worked with and collaborated with and helped and invested in those things since the very beginning because we believe that open source and open science, which most of them are doing, is super important to generate that choice,” he added.