Choose France: new harvest of investments expected, particularly in AI

With France ranked by EY as the most attractive country in Europe for foreign investment for the sixth consecutive year, Choose France, which this year brings together more than 200 CEOs from five continents at the Palace of Versailles, will announce €37 billion in investments this year, according to the Élysée Palace on Sunday evening. Twenty of these are "entirely new," a record, as the last edition generated €15 billion in investments.

Some, like the president of the Normandy region, Hervé Morin, in an interview with Ouest-France on Sunday, believe that Choose France "is first and foremost a major communications operation" where projects in which the regions, in particular, "have played a major role" in convincing others are highlighted.

The Elysée Palace, on the other hand, assures that "no recycling" is taking place regarding announced projects. The presidency of the Republic distinguishes between "new" projects and the 17 billion euros in less new but "now localized" projects, the overall budget of which was presented at the Paris Artificial Intelligence Summit last February," where a total of 109 billion euros of investment was announced.

Well-kept secret

Details of the announcements from this summit, entitled "France, Land of Creativity," will be officially released on Monday morning.

On Sunday evening, however, the newspaper Le Parisien revealed a huge investment of 6.4 billion euros by the American logistics giant Prologis, including four data centers in the Ile-de-France region.

On Friday, La Tribune reported the completion of a first tranche, worth 8 billion euros, of an Emirati data center project worth 50 billion euros announced in February at the Artificial Intelligence Summit in Paris, which had attracted 109 billion euros in private commitments.

Le Parisien also believes that Amazon will announce a 300 million euro development project.

Le Figaro mentions four projects totaling 800 million euros, including 90 million by the German company Daimler to expand its electric bus factory in the Meuse, and 450 million euros by the American company Circ in the Moselle for a chemical textile recycling factory.

Emmanuel Macron will visit the Daimler bus factory in Ligny-en-Barrois in the Meuse region on Monday.

He will make a total of four trips on the sidelines of the summit.

The government announced on Sunday that it wanted to overhaul the textile recycling sector, deeming the current model "out of breath."

Macron presented as a deal maker

Choose France, explains the Elysée, is "a method" consisting of the government, but especially the president, "devoting time" to discussions with major world leaders, for financial commitments where "personal knowledge" is decisive.

He will chair a round table with South Korean bosses and two others on artificial intelligence and the energy transition.

He will host Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, Stella Li, president of Chinese electric car maker BYD, and the CEO of Saudi company Qiddiya, before chairing a working dinner at Versailles.

Tourism, TV, and Teddy Riner

Among the new features this year are a sequence on investments in tourism and heritage, and another on film and audiovisual production.

In an interview with La Tribune on Sunday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that France "is very important" for the platform, whose productions such as "Lupin," "Sous la Seine," "Tapie," and "Ad Vitam" employed "25,000 French actors and technicians between 2021 and 2024."

Multi-gold medalist judoka Teddy Riner will be the guest of honor at the plenary session.

Gulf sovereign wealth funds will be present: Mubadala (Abu Dhabi), PIF (Saudi Arabia), QIA (Qatar). Emmanuel Macron's visits on Tuesday include the inauguration of the PIF's Paris office.