SoftBank’s €75 billion, France’s contraction

The ninth Choose France summit ended with SoftBank promising "up to" €75 billion for AI data centres, taking cumulative investment announcements beyond the €100 billion mark since 2018. Two days earlier, France's statistics office published the less flattering number: GDP fell -0.1% in Q1 2026, the first contraction since mid-2020.

So the European country most loudly selling itself as an investment magnet is also shrinking. For Malta, where government has long treated headline investment figures as proof of economic competence, the distinction matters: a pledge is not a factory, and a press release is not a payroll.

The French government has no public scorecard for these pledges. After nine summits and more than 230 projects announced, it has still not published a systematic account of how many were actually built. Some clearly were. The problem is that nobody outside government can say 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, put the gap plainly: industrial job creation averaged 15,000 per year under the Macron presidency, when roughly 70,000 per year would have been needed for real reindustrialisation.

The EY European Attractiveness Survey points the same way. Actual FDI projects, meaning foreign direct investment where companies build real facilities, fell in France from 1,194 in 2023 to 852 in 2025. That is a 29% fall in two years.

France still ranks first in Europe. But the pipeline is getting thinner. Fewer projects are carrying bigger political headlines.

SoftBank's €75 Billion: Read the Fine Print

SoftBank's "up to" €75 billion is a ceiling, not a binding commitment. Phase 1, worth €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 timetable 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 the end of 2026.

Its balance sheet also relies heavily on paper gains from a $64.6 billion stake in OpenAI, a privately held company whose shares cannot be easily sold. Analysts describe this as the "old playbook": in 2016, SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son pledged $50 billion to the United States alongside Donald Trump. Much of that money ended up in WeWork, which later collapsed.

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

Who Gains, Who Pays

France does have a serious advantage in this race: nuclear power. Its 57 reactors produce cheap electricity around the clock, roughly 73 USD/MWh wholesale compared with 100 USD/MWh in Germany. For AI data centres, which need constant power, that matters more than Spain's cheaper but intermittent solar.

France now offers large industrial users long-term contracts tied to EDF's production cost rather than wholesale market prices. Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank, has called such arrangements Europe's "under-the-radar industrial policy". The mechanism is simple enough: the state uses control over electricity pricing to make selected industrial projects more attractive.

The winners are investors who secure stable power prices and the French government, which can point to AI infrastructure as proof that industry is returning. The losers are harder to name politically: other power users, regions waiting for grid investment, and workers expecting industrial jobs that data centres rarely provide.

Brookings Institution research shows that a typical large data centre employs 50 to 400 people once construction ends. Construction creates work. Operations do not employ many people. For the kind of money SoftBank is discussing, a conventional factory would create far more lasting employment.

The electricity demand is not marginal. 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 answered that question.

What Remains Uncertain

Some Choose France projects do materialise. Orano-XTC broke ground on a battery materials plant at Dunkirk in May 2026, three years after the announcement. Others fade without ceremony. France's biggest European battery venture, ACC, had to bring in Chinese technicians to keep its own factory running.

For Europe, the issue is whether this model amounts to industrial strategy or political communication: large pledges, generous energy pricing, limited permanent jobs and no public accountability. Until France publishes conversion rates, everyone else is left counting press releases.