SoftBank Bets €75 Billion on French AI Data Centers

SoftBank Group will spend up to €75 billion, around $87 billion, on a network of artificial intelligence data centers across France. The company confirmed the plan on May 31, calling it its largest AI infrastructure commitment in Europe and the biggest it has made outside the United States.

The headline figure buys ambition. SoftBank wants up to 5 gigawatts of new computing capacity on French soil. A first phase worth €45 billion would deliver 3.1 gigawatts across three sites in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, at Dunkirk, Bosquel and Bouchain. For the Dunkirk buildout the firm has partnered with Schneider Electric to develop a large industrial cluster, the kind of supplier base a project this size needs close at hand.

Why France, and why now

The deal grew out of personal diplomacy. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son met President Emmanuel Macron during the French leader's visit to Japan earlier this year, and the two have stayed in contact since, according to CNBC. France offers something scarce in the data center business: abundant low-carbon electricity from its nuclear fleet, which makes powering gigawatts of accelerators more practical than in most of Europe.

There is a strategic read too. SoftBank is both an investor in and a customer of OpenAI, and it has been assembling compute capacity on several continents to feed the next generation of frontier models. Locking in European sites gives that effort a foothold close to regulators, enterprise customers and a data-sovereignty conversation that keeps getting louder.

Europe tries to close the gap

The announcement lands as Europe scrambles to keep pace with the United States and China on AI infrastructure. Just last week the French startup Mistral detailed its own data center push near Paris, part of a broader continental effort we covered in our report on Mistral's full-stack strategy. A €75 billion outside investment of this scale is a different order of magnitude, and a vote of confidence that the money and the megawatts can be found in Europe rather than only across the Atlantic.

Plenty can still go wrong between a press release and a running data hall. Grid connections, permitting and local opposition have slowed projects half this size, and the 2031 target leaves years for conditions to shift. For now, though, the number on the page is real, and it points at a France that wants to be one of the places the AI build-out actually happens.