The United Arab Emirates will build a giant data center in France, announced the French presidency Thursday, February 6, on the first day of a world summit on artificial intelligence (IA) in Paris, while the country aims to become becoming the Europeanhead figure. This data center with a calculation capacity of up to a gigawatt will be part of an “campus” focused on AI, the largest in Europe, according to the Elysée. This represents “30 to 50 billion euros” in investments, as part of a partnership agreement signed in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and his counterpart Emirati Mohamed Ben Zayed Al-Nahyane.
This campus will be developed by “a consortium of Franco-Emiratis champions”, in particular by the MGX investment fund, backed by the United Arab Emirates. Its location must still be decided.
In addition, the French Minister responsible for AI, Clara Chappaz, announced that 35 sites were “ready to use” to accommodate new data centers on the national territory. They will occupy some 1,200 hectares and their location will be revealed early next week.
The summit, co -chaired with India and which is held until February 11, started at the Polytechnic engineering school with two days of round tables. The meetings will continue on Saturday and Sunday, devoted to AI in culture. The French head of state will give an interview to France 2 television and to the Indian media First on Sunday, “in the wake of the 8:00 pm newspaper”.
Before diplomatic exchanges Monday and Tuesday, which should lead to “a declaration of desire for shared progress”, according to the special envoy of the President of the Republic for the summit, Anne Bouverot.
The participation of a hundred countries is announced, with the American vice-president JD Vance, the Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Zhang Guoqing, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The uncertainty persists as to the presence of Elon Musk and that of Liang Wenfeng, founder of the last start-up in sight, the Chinese Deepseek, with which the Elysée is in “discussions”. A “Business Day” will also be organized on Tuesday at Station F, the start-up incubator founded by the French billionaire Xavier Niel, himself an actor of the tech.
“Open Source”
“AI must go from research laboratories to real world institutions. For AI to really serve society, we need solid links between the university environment, industry and entrepreneurship,” argued Clara Chappaz .
“The most important thing I would like to see this summit emerges is to ensure that the artificial intelligence platforms that will be widely used in the future will be in open source” (“open source”), told to AFP French Yann Lecun, head of the Meta IA research laboratory, on the Polytechnic campus. In addition to his defense of these models, whose code is made public so that researchers or entrepreneurs seize it, he sets himself against the implementation of “regulations which slow scientific progress”.
Yoshua Bengio, Turing 2018 Prix and one of the most important researchers in AI, said “optimistic” concerning the results of the summit. The objective “is to bring high-level public decision-makers to pay some attention to the discussions on the beneficial and dangerous sides of the AI,” he said from the École Normale Supérieure where he presented the First international report on the security of this technology.
The Mistralai teams, French rival of the American giants who signed a partnership with AFP, took the opportunity to announce the arrival of an application of their Le Chat tool (Chatgpt equivalent) in Google stores and Android.
As for Openai, the Chatgpt creator, it will allow certain European customers to store data from their exchanges with its conversational agents within the EU, rather than in the United States or elsewhere, giving them control of these precious Information.
Finally, about the irruption of Deepseek and the announcement of a $ 500 billion financing plan by the United States to develop infrastructure in AI, Anne Bouverot wanted to be reassuring.
“The recent conversation on AI, with what the United States announces on the one hand and China on the other, we find that it rather reinforces the voice that France carries, which is a voice with talents, With open source, “she told the press.