The President of the Republic wants to speed up artificial intelligence. During a public speechEmmanuel Macron announced measures to make France a world champion.
Many of these measures include recommendations issued by the Commission on Artificial Intelligence, who presented his report last March.
Healthy energy for future data centers
The government will primarily focus on industrial capacity. The idea is to advance in the market for computing power and semiconductor manufacturing. Emmanuel Macron reminded that France can count on advantages from an energy point of view, a real “AI bottleneck”. Since the AI sector is often accused of being a very energy-intensive industry.
“Thanks to nuclear power and renewable energy sources, we have large amounts of low-carbon energy. And we want to completely move away from thermal energy by 2027. So, we have the capacity to host new data centers,” the president summarized.
However, he acknowledges a “lag in computing capacity.” France has only 3% of GPUs in the world. The president would like to reach 20%. To do this, he recognizes the need to rely on foreign players such as Amazon or Microsoft. Enough to justify it recent investment pledges in France awarded by two American giants.
In the production of semiconductors, the president also wants to rely on partnerships with international players, especially American or Taiwanese ones. But Macron says he is “open” to new proposals.
Investments, sinews of war
In parallel with these industry efforts, the government also wants national funding for artificial intelligence. The new investment fund, in which the state will participate a quarter, must invest in initiatives related to “chips to the cloud via LLM”.
Emmanuel Macron also welcomed the efforts of French players already present, such as Mistral AI, but also new startup H. This new company just finished raising $220 million in funding. Among the investors are Accel, UiPath, Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and even Amazon. However, the president did not refrain from criticizing European policy in this area, saying that “Europe is the continent that regulates the best, but invests the least. »
Finally, pay attention to the announcement of a new strategic partnership with the United Arab Emirates as reported by AFP. It aims at close cooperation in the research sector, investments in data centers, the semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence applications.
100,000 students are trained in AI annually
The third part of the strategy announced by the President, the research effort. This includes doubling the number of people trained in artificial intelligence technologies. “Today we have 40,000 trained people a year, we want to increase to 100,000”, said the president.
Investments of 400 million euros have been announced for 9 specialized university research locations. But also a new program of chairs for clusters.
The president also wants to expand these efforts to national education, for example by offering training in artificial intelligence technologies from the 6th grade.