France, UAE to Invest Up to €50 Billion in AI Megadatacenter

The project, to be built in France, was unveiled on Thursday evening during a meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The facility's scale will surpass traditional cloud and hyperscale datacenters, which typically operate in the tens of megawatts, underscoring the rising demand for power-intensive AI workloads.

While large-scale facilities are not unheard of, the planned datacenter remains significantly smaller than similar US initiatives. Meta recently began constructing a 2.3-gigawatt site in Louisiana, while the proposed Stargate project in the United States could reach an unprecedented $500 billion investment.

The Franco-Emirati venture is expected to secure funding from multiple sources, with investment estimates ranging from €30 billion to €50 billion ($31 billion to $51 billion). MGX, a $100 billion Abu Dhabi-based investment fund, is reportedly involved in financing both this project and the Stargate initiative. The first phase of UAE investments will be formally announced at the Choose France 2025 summit later this year, according to a joint statement from both nations.

Beyond datacenter infrastructure, the partnership will focus on securing advanced semiconductors, attracting AI talent, and establishing virtual data embassies to develop sovereign AI and cloud services in France and the UAE.

The collaboration comes as the UAE strengthens ties with AI infrastructure providers, including Microsoft and Cerebras, in response to tightening US export restrictions on high-performance AI accelerators. The Biden administration’s latest measures, if continued under President Donald Trump, could severely limit the UAE’s access to American-designed chips critical for AI development.

France, meanwhile, is home to Mistral.AI, a prominent European AI startup that has developed large language models capable of competing with well-funded US counterparts.

As part of the broader Franco-Emirati cooperation, Cerebras—backed by UAE-based G42—announced it will provide its wafer-scale AI compute platform to Mistral.AI. The technology, integrated into Mistral’s Le Chat platform, supports "Flash Answers," which claims to generate 1,100 tokens per second using speculative decoding techniques.

The announcements come ahead of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris next week, where discussions are expected to cover China's AI advancements and the policies of newly elected US President Donald Trump.