France Launches €10.9 Billion “Stargate Riva” Initiative: Can Europe Breakthrough in the AI Race?

On February 10, 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a €10.9 billion (“Stargate Riva”) investment plan at the Paris AI Action Summit. This initiative includes the selection of 35 data center locations, chip manufacturing bases, and talent development programs. The funding for this plan is partially supported by a €5 billion contribution from the UAE’s MGX Fund, €2 billion from Brookfield Asset Management in Canada, and investments from French domestic enterprises.

In comparison, the U.S. Trump administration announced a $50 billion “Stargate” investment plan in January 2025, led by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. While France’s investment is lower than that of the U.S., it has its own advantages. France’s nuclear energy accounts for 70% of its power supply, making its data center operating costs 40% cheaper than those in Germany. Additionally, Mistral AI’s Le Chat assistant reached the top of the French app store charts within three days of its launch and achieved a token generation speed exceeding that of ChatGPT by generating 1,000 tokens per second.

In the global AI landscape, China’s DeepSeek model has made significant progress, achieving 90% of OpenAI’s performance at one-fifth the cost, which has triggered a wave of selling in technology stocks. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has publicly questioned the authenticity of U.S. “Stargate” funding, claiming that SoftBank actually raised less than €1 billion. The CEO of Anthropic has also criticized the project for issues such as “opaque funding commitments and confused technical routes.”

France has taken several steps to build its AI ecosystem, including constructing a 1GW AI data center in collaboration with the UAE, General Catalyst leading a €15 billion fund, Mistral Enterprise supporting private deployment, and Paris Institute of Technology adding an AI doctorate program. However, Europe faces challenges such as having only one-fifth the computing power of the U.S., inconsistent regulatory standards across its 28 member states, and potential resource duplication with Germany’s concurrent €8 billion plan.

The first batch of data centers is expected to be operational by Q2 2026. With General Catalyst and other institutions establishing a €15 billion pan-European AI fund, the transatlantic AI competition is intensifying. Whether Europe can emerge victorious in this race remains uncertain.