SoftBank Group will invest up to €75 billion ($87 billion) to build 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity across France, the firm announced Saturday, calling it its largest AI infrastructure commitment in Europe. The first phase is a €45 billion outlay to deliver 3.1 gigawatts of capacity in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, anchored by sites in Dunkirk (Loon-Plage), Bosquel, and Bouchain. Emmanuel Macron and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son are expected to formally announce the plan at the Choose France Summit.
The structure is staged. SoftBank will start with the three Hauts-de-France sites and then develop additional locations across the country to hit the full 5GW target. Schneider Electric SE is signed on as a partner in Dunkirk, where SoftBank intends to build a hub for AI infrastructure and robotics manufacturing positioned to serve customers in London, Brussels, and Amsterdam.
The deal grew out of direct contact between Macron and Son during the French president's visit to Japan earlier this year. Son had previously floated the idea of investing as much as $100 billion in France, and the final €75 billion figure reflects months of follow-up review.
Key facts
- 01SoftBank will invest up to €75 billion ($87 billion) to build 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity across France.
- 02The first phase is a €45 billion commitment delivering 3.1 gigawatts to the Hauts-de-France region by 2031.
- 03Initial sites are Dunkirk (Loon-Plage), Bosquel, and Bouchain, with Schneider Electric SE partnering on Dunkirk.
- 04The French plan follows SoftBank's March announcement of a potential $500 billion, 10GW Ohio project powered by a 9.2GW gas plant.
- 05SoftBank has committed over $60 billion to [OpenAI](/openai) for a roughly 13% stake.
French economic minister Roland Lescure framed the commitment as validation of Macron's industrial strategy. Macron has been an outspoken proponent of sovereign AI — the idea that countries outside the US and China should control their own compute and back local model builders such as Mistral AI rather than depend entirely on American infrastructure.
For SoftBank, France is the latest leg in a global build-out that now spans three continents. In March, the firm announced a potential $500 billion data center project in Ohio targeting 10 gigawatts of capacity, powered by a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant and roughly $33 billion worth of gas-fired electricity. That sits on top of the $500 billion Stargate initiative SoftBank is pursuing with OpenAI, Oracle Corp., and Abu Dhabi's MGX to roll out data centers across the United States.
Son's pitch to investors and partners is that AI compute demand will absorb every gigawatt he can finance. SoftBank has also committed more than $60 billion to OpenAI for a stake of about 13%, making it both a major shareholder in and a major infrastructure supplier to the company whose models drive much of the demand he is building for.
“I was very impressed by the fact that Emmanuel Macron is so personally committed to ensuring France's economic success, even though our investments have so far been concentrated mainly in the US, as well as in Japan and Asia.”— Masayoshi Son, SoftBank founder
Financing remains the open question. SoftBank scaled back plans for a $10 billion margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake after some creditors balked, with the conglomerate and its bankers now targeting an amount as low as $6 billion. The €75 billion French commitment, the $500 billion Ohio plan, and the $500 billion Stargate program collectively imply capital deployment well beyond anything SoftBank has historically managed in a comparable window.
US opposition to data center construction is also intensifying, with local fights over grid impact, utility rates, and water use slowing some projects. France offers a different political setup: an executive personally lobbying for the build-out, a regional industrial policy aligned with it, and a grid where nuclear baseload makes the power story cleaner to tell than gas-fired Ohio.
What's still unclear is the customer mix. SoftBank has not disclosed which model providers or enterprises will fill the 3.1 gigawatts coming online by 2031, nor whether OpenAI workloads — the most obvious anchor tenant given SoftBank's equity position — will run through these sites. Capacity built without committed offtake at this scale is the central risk.
The strategic read is that SoftBank is racing to become the landlord of the AI era in as many jurisdictions as possible before financing windows close or competitors lock in sites. France gets sovereign AI capacity it has been lobbying for, OpenAI gets European compute that sidesteps some of the political friction now hitting US builds, and Son gets a second continent on which to monetize the OpenAI relationship beyond his equity check. Whether the math works depends on something none of the announcements address: who pays for the 5 gigawatts once they're switched on.
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