At the Grand Palais in Paris, on February 10–11, 2025, Emmanuel Macron closed the first day of the AI Action Summit with a pointed message: France can deliver the energy that artificial intelligence companies are looking for — and it does so through nuclear power. «Plug, baby, plug» was the phrase the French president used to encapsulate his pitch to the global tech world — a deliberate echo of Trump’s «drill, baby, drill», flipped to celebrate an energy model that is already operational, clean, and abundant.
The summit brought together more than a thousand participants from over a hundred countries, co-chaired by Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Compared to previous gatherings at Bletchley Park and Seoul, the Paris edition marked a clear shift in tone: less emphasis on safety as the defining theme, more focus on investment and infrastructure. France’s electricity grid — with nearly 94% of its power coming from low-carbon sources, driven by its nuclear fleet — emerged as the most concrete argument put forward by any European leader. EDF has already set a price cap of €70 per megawatt-hour for nuclear output from 2026 onward, a figure of considerable interest to anyone planning data center investments over a ten-year horizon.
The numbers that came out of the summit are telling. Private investors announced commitments totaling nearly €110 billion earmarked for AI in France. The headline pledges include between €30 and €50 billion from the United Arab Emirates for a large-scale data center campus, and a further €20 billion from Brookfield, the Canadian fund that controls Data4, one of Europe’s largest data center operators. Microsoft has already committed €4 billion to expanding its cloud infrastructure in France, with a target of deploying 25,000 next-generation GPUs by the end of 2025. France’s total data center capacity reached 2,070 megawatts in 2025 and is projected to exceed 4,550 megawatts by 2030.
In 2024, France exported around 90 terawatt-hours of decarbonized electricity. Macron presented this surplus as a unique strategic asset: available land, stable and dispatchable nuclear energy, and a regulatory process he vowed to streamline along the lines of the Notre-Dame reconstruction effort. The European Union moved in parallel with its InvestAI initiative, which aims to mobilize €200 billion — including €20 billion earmarked for so-called AI «gigafactories». Trudeau’s Canada struck a similar chord on nuclear, pointing to large reactors as an unavoidable part of the energy solution for AI. Google and Microsoft had already signed agreements to source nuclear power for their data centers well before the Paris summit.
The contest now underway is not purely technological. Whoever controls the energy controls where AI infrastructure gets built — and, by extension, where capital and talent will cluster. France holds a concrete advantage in its nuclear fleet and is working to turn that into a lasting industrial position. If the commitments made in Paris translate into actual construction, France’s reactor network could become the energy backbone of European AI for the next decade.
