French heavyweights including Orange, Iliad and EDF said Wednesday that they were banding together for a giant artificial intelligence infrastructure project.
The firms, from sectors ranging from supercomputing to semiconductors and energy generation, will plough around 10 billion euros ($11.6 billion) into the plan for an AI “gigafactory” dubbed Aion.
“In France we’re lucky to have a stable supply of large quantities of carbon-free electricity” thanks to the country’s nuclear reactor fleet, said Damien Lucas, head of Iliad’s cloud services arm Scaleway.
He added that the country had “the know-how to build data centres and the AI talent” to make use of them.
“These are the right ingredients for a viable, ambitious project,” Lucas said.
Aion is France’s tender in a European Union call for proposals to create a handful of capital-intensive computing mega-projects in the bloc.
Such infrastructure is vital to develop and deploy the most ambitious AI systems.
But Wednesday’s announcement is relatively small compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars invested by American and Asian giants in data centres.
The companies say their project would ultimately create around one gigawatt of computing power spread across several different data centres in France.
An initial tranche would total 100 megawatts, Lucas said.
Iliad chief Thomas Reynaud said the company, which also owns the mobile operator Free, would stump up four billion of the 10-billion-euro cost.
Participants hope they will receive “several hundred million euros in public contracts” from both the European Commission and the French government, Reynaud added.
“Currently, 80 percent of global computing power is on American soil,” Lucas said, calling Aion “an opportunity to reverse the trend”.
The Aion organisers said they were in talks to bring further companies aboard, including French AI developer Mistral.
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