SoftBank's €75 billion French AI Bet

Versailles is built for grand pledges, and SoftBank brought one big enough to suit the setting: €75 billion for AI data centres across northern France, announced at the Choose France summit. If it happens, it would be the largest single AI infrastructure deal signed in Europe, almost matching the €87 billion attracted by all nine Choose France summits combined since 2018. The harder question is whether Masayoshi Son can turn the promise into cables, turbines and servers.

What 5 Gigawatts Actually Means

At the centre of the plan is 5 gigawatts of data centre capacity. Run continuously, that is roughly half Belgium's peak electricity demand, devoted to training and operating AI models.

France currently has about 1.5 GW of installed data centre capacity. SoftBank would more than quadruple it. The first phase, worth €45 billion, aims to deliver 3.1 GW across three sites in northern France by 2031: Dunkirk, Bosquel and Bouchain, where EDF is turning a decommissioned thermal plant into a data centre site. Schneider Electric will build a roboticised factory at Dunkirk's port to make power modules locally.

The politics of this are really the politics of electricity. AI data centres consume power on a scale that makes ordinary industrial demand look modest, and France has what most European neighbours do not: a fleet of nuclear reactors producing steady, weather-independent electricity. Son said the quiet part directly: "The fact that the country is an energy producer and exporter is absolutely crucial for infrastructure investments in artificial intelligence."

Ireland knows the other side of that story. Irish data centres now use 22% of national electricity, more than all urban households combined, and new grid connections are frozen until 2028. In Europe's most attractive data centre locations, waiting times now run to 7-13 years. Energy policy has become AI policy.

The Man Who Lost WeWork and Sold Nvidia

The complication is SoftBank itself. Son's Vision Fund lost $32 billion after backing WeWork, whose $47 billion valuation collapsed before it ever reached public markets. SoftBank also once held 4.9% of Nvidia at $4 a share, then sold the entire stake in 2019 to cover losses. That holding would be worth roughly $40 billion today.

Son's recovery came through another huge wager. SoftBank invested more than $30 billion in OpenAI, and in fiscal year 2026 the Vision Fund recorded $46 billion in gains, with 92% linked to OpenAI's rising valuation. S&P has downgraded SoftBank's credit outlook to negative, warning that this concentration could weaken its financial flexibility. If OpenAI's valuation slips, the funding behind the French data centres becomes less certain.

The pledge also fits an older pattern. In 2016, Son promised tens of billions in US investment to the incoming Trump administration, routed through the Vision Fund before that vehicle ran into trouble. This time the wording is careful: "up to" €75 billion, a "commitment to develop", and a second phase with no locations or timetable yet.

Seed Money vs. the Global Arms Race

For Europe, the deal exposes the gap between ambition and scale. Germany, the continent's largest economy, has answered the AI infrastructure race with a €125 million programme for frontier AI labs through its innovation agency SPRIND. SoftBank's first phase alone is 360 times larger.

The comparison gets harsher outside Europe. The four largest US technology companies plan to spend a combined €650 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. SoftBank's five-year pledge amounts to about 11% of a single year of spending by America's tech giants.

France is betting that nuclear baseload, meaning constant power that does not depend on the weather, can be turned into an industrial advantage. Add faster permitting and state-backed land, and Paris has a case that no neighbour can easily copy. The energy logic is clear enough. The financial logic depends on Son remaining solvent, OpenAI holding its value and grid connections arriving on time. In Europe, that last condition is often where the plan begins to fray.