Emmanuel Macron brings together OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind on the occasion of the G7

Évian-les-Bains, its mineral waters, its lake and, this week, an unusual concentration of global tech leaders. France chairs the G7 this year and is hosting the summit from June 15 to 17, with artificial intelligence at the very top of the agenda.For the head of state, this is an opportunity to turn three days of diplomacy into a showcase of an openly embraced ambition: to make France the stronghold of AI in Europe.

Three AI chiefs for one lunch

Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, accepted Macron’s personal invitation and will travel to a G7 summit for the first time. He will not be the only one representing the world’s AI giants by the lake: Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic (barely a few days after the export restrictions on Claude Mythos and Fable—funny timing), are also expected. Three of the laboratories competing for the lead in the global race, brought together around the same table.

Concretely, a working lunch on Wednesday will bring together political leaders and tech executives to discuss AI infrastructure, networks and regulation. The club’s seven members (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and France, plus the European Union) must also examine a joint declaration on protecting minors online, an issue that keeps resurfacing insistently in the French news. On the corporate side, they are expected above all to leave with a series of voluntary commitments (a diplomatic way of saying that no one will sign anything binding).

At the end of May, at the Choose France summit, the Élysée had amassed some €93 billion in pledges of foreign investment, including SoftBank’s enormous commitment to AI-dedicated data centers (by far the main attraction). This gave Macron a ready-made case to present before his guests.

Does France have the means to match its ambitions?

The country derives most of its electricity from nuclear reactors, giving it an abundant, low-carbon energy source to offer data-center operators. The argument comes at the right time, now that power-grid capacity has become the industry’s main bottleneck. This is virtually the only strength in the case that does not depend on foreign backing (in other words, it counts for double).

For the rest, the billions come largely from elsewhere: from Japan through SoftBank, from Canada through asset manager Brookfield, and from Gulf funds circling the sector. But an announced investment and a gigawatt actually operating are two different things. These commitments are multiyear and conditional, contingent on grid connections, administrative approvals, and an AI economy that could still reverse course. France is also starting from some way back: its installed data-center capacity stood at around 1.5 GW at the end of 2025, a figure the SoftBank project alone promises to triple. For scale, 5 gigawatts are equivalent to several nuclear reactors operating at full capacity.

In February 2025, the AI Action Summit at the Grand Palais had already brought together the same big names and generated a flood of announcements, some of which are still waiting to materialize. The issue is therefore not entirely unprecedented.

For France, the real question will not be settled over Wednesday lunch, but over the five years it will take to turn those promised gigawatts into data centers that actually run, or not.

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Source: Bloomberg