The United Arab Emirates are to build an artificial intelligence “campus” in France, including a giant data center with a computing capacity of up to one gigawatt, “representing investments in the order of magnitude of 30 to 50 billion euros," the French presidency announced on Thursday.
These investments are part of an AI partnership agreement signed on Thursday evening in Paris in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and his Emirati counterpart Mohamed ben Zayed al-Nahyan.
The campus, whose precise location has yet to be decided, will be developed by the MGX investment fund, backed by the United Arab Emirates.
This is the first major investment to be announced at the AI summit scheduled to run until Tuesday in Paris, at which France and Europe aim to position themselves as competitive powers vis-à-vis the USA and China.
On Thursday morning, the French government announced that it had identified 35 new sites ready to host data centers. These data centers store data and provide the enormous computing capacity required by artificial intelligence, a technology that consumes a lot of energy.
With AFP
Comments