France believes its cheap, low-carbon electricity is Europe’s overlooked advantage in AI. A debate has now opened over that power. Should it go to homegrown AI firms, or to the American giants building data centres on French soil?
When the head of Europe’s biggest AI lab arrived at last month’s G7 working lunch on artificial intelligence, he did not come to talk about models. He came to talk about electricity. Arthur Mensch, the chief executive of Mistral AI, addressed the room on 17 June.
France’s relatively cheap power, he said, is a strategic asset the country risks squandering. His audience, as reported by Politico, included Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, and the chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI.
Mensch’s case is simple. Training and running AI takes vast amounts of electricity, and France, with its fleet of nuclear plants, has a surplus of it. “Electricity is the primary substrate”, he said. “You have to control the infrastructure, and Europe is relatively well-positioned.”
The risk, in his telling, is selling that power cheaply to others. “Either you sell that to Americans, who will resell it 10 times more expensively in the form of artificial intelligence”, he said, “or you transform it yourself.”
The scale of the demand
The numbers show why the question is pressing. A single supercomputer that SoftBank plans to build in northern France is expected to draw between 3 and 5 gigawatts. SoftBank announced it at the Choose France summit in late May. For context, the total capacity currently allocated to every data centre in the country is under one gigawatt.
Global AI firms are racing to expand their computing capacity, and France, facing deindustrialisation, has courted them hard. Its 2025 AI Summit produced pledges of 109 billion euros, mostly from foreign investors, under Macron’s slogan “Plug, baby, plug!”
The case for reserving power
Mensch’s intervention has sharpened a debate that was already under way. Some officials want a share of France’s electricity ringfenced for European firms. Nicolas Dufourcq, who runs the state investment bank Bpifrance, said he could imagine reserving around 20 percent of capacity for European players.
The state utility EDF is selling its surplus power and offering land. It favoured domestic bidders in its first allocations. Three of four calls went to the French firms Eclairion, Mistral and OpCore. The fourth is expected to go to SoftBank. The push for European-owned infrastructure is part of a wider argument about who captures the value AI creates.
The issue has entered the 2027 presidential campaign, with candidates from several parties backing some form of preferential access.
The stance is not without complication. Mistral, the national champion at the centre of the sovereignty case, is itself building an “AI Campus”. Investors including the Emirati fund MGX, Nvidia and Bpifrance are putting in 30 to 50 billion euros.
Homegrown ambition, in practice, still leans on foreign capital.
The case for the Americans
Other French voices are wary of shutting the door. Hélène Macela, a vice-president at Schneider Electric, argued that a data centre brings more than its own headcount. “A data center is like an ultra-digitalised factory”, she said. “It is not a reservoir of jobs in itself, but you have to look at the entire ecosystem around it: construction workers, installers, equipment suppliers, technicians, security personnel.”
Her firm plans to build a factory alongside SoftBank’s data centre. Better to host these projects in France, she suggested, than watch them go elsewhere.
Guillaume Basset, deputy chief executive of Business France, took a similarly pragmatic line. “It’s a race against the clock”, he said. “When the train passes, it won’t come by twice.” Foreign firms, he added, tend to concentrate their investment in a single country, which raises the cost of turning them away.
A European question
The argument reaches beyond France. Across Europe, governments are weighing how to turn energy and grid capacity into an AI advantage rather than an export. France holds one of the continent’s strongest hands: abundant, low-carbon, comparatively cheap power. What it has not yet settled is who gets to plug into it, and on what terms.
As Macron courts investment from around the world, that is the question now dividing Paris.
