SoftBank’s €75 billion pledge masks a French contraction

The ninth Choose France summit wrapped up with SoftBank pledging "up to" €75 billion for AI data centres, pushing cumulative investment announcements past the €100 billion mark since 2018. Two days earlier, France's national statistics office reported something less photogenic: GDP contracted -0.1% in Q1 2026, the first decline since mid-2020. The country leading Europe in investment pledges is shrinking.

The pledges face no public scorecard. Nine summits, over 230 projects announced, and the government has never published a systematic accounting of how many actually get built. Some are real. Nobody knows how many.

The Numbers That Don't Match

France lost a net 20,000 industrial jobs in 2025. Manufacturing's share of GDP slipped from 10% in 2017 to 9.5% in 2025. Unemployment climbed back to 8.1%. Olivier Lluansi, a former industry adviser to the Élysée Palace, puts it bluntly: industrial job creation averaged 15,000 per year under the Macron presidency, when roughly 70,000 per year would have been needed for genuine reindustrialisation.

The EY European Attractiveness Survey confirms the direction. Actual FDI projects (foreign direct investment, meaning real facilities built by foreign companies) in France fell from 1,194 in 2023 to 852 in 2025, a 29% drop in two years. France still ranks first in Europe, but the pipeline is thinning. Fewer deals, bigger headlines.

SoftBank's €75 Billion: Read the Fine Print

SoftBank's pledge of "up to" €75 billion is a ceiling, not a commitment. Phase 1 (€45 billion for 3.1 GW of data centre capacity by 2031) has named sites and partners, including EDF, the state-owned energy utility. Phase 2 (another €30 billion) has no timeline and no disclosed financing plan.

S&P rates SoftBank BB+ with a negative outlook, below investment grade. The company carries roughly $123 billion in net debt and faces a $50 billion refinancing wall by end of 2026. Its balance sheet leans heavily on paper gains from a $64.6 billion stake in OpenAI, which is privately held and cannot be easily sold. Analysts call this the "old playbook": in 2016, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son pledged $50 billion to the United States alongside Donald Trump. Much of that money ended up in WeWork, which collapsed.

SoftBank is simultaneously promising $100 billion in the US and €75 billion in France, from the same balance sheet.

Who Gains, Who Pays

France has a genuine advantage in this race: nuclear power. Its 57 reactors produce cheap, round-the-clock electricity, roughly 73 USD/MWh wholesale versus 100 USD/MWh in Germany. For AI data centres that need constant power, that matters more than Spain's cheap but intermittent solar. France now offers large industrial users long-term contracts tied to EDF's production cost, not wholesale market prices. Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank, has flagged such arrangements as Europe's "under-the-radar industrial policy".

But data centres create very few permanent jobs. Brookings Institution research shows a typical large facility employs 50 to 400 people once construction ends. The construction phase is labour-intensive; the operational phase is not. For the kind of money SoftBank is discussing, a traditional factory would create far more lasting employment.

The energy demand is real. SoftBank's full plan would consume roughly 45–50 TWh per year, about 10% of France's total electricity output. Can the northern transmission grid absorb 3.1 GW of new load by 2031? Neither RTE (the grid operator) nor EDF has publicly addressed it.

What Remains Uncertain

Some projects materialise. Orano-XTC broke ground on a battery materials plant at Dunkirk in May 2026, three years after its Choose France announcement. Others fade quietly. France's biggest European battery venture, ACC, had to bring in Chinese technicians to keep its own factory running.

The question for Europe is whether this investment model, with large pledges, generous energy pricing, limited job creation, and no public accountability, is an industrial strategy or a communications strategy. Until France publishes conversion rates, the rest of Europe is left counting press releases.