A year ago at NVIDIA GTC Paris at VivaTech, France laid out plans to advance local AI — from new AI factories and national compute capacity to open frontier models and industrial platforms.

Now, that AI infrastructure is coming online. AI agents are running in production, startups are deploying applications and the French AI ecosystem is developing models, datasets and platforms designed around local languages, cultural context and European requirements.

French AI Infrastructure Takes Shape

France’s AI ambitions are gaining momentum. Billions in investment commitments through France 2030, the 2025 AI Action Summit and this year’s Choose France Summit are reinforcing the country’s position as one of Europe’s leading destinations for AI infrastructure.

As part of these efforts, Mistral is building a new 44-megawatt data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel, a commune in northern France. Announced at GTC Paris last year, Mistral’s first deployment is already operational with 18,000 NVIDIA GB200 systems — laying the foundation for the company’s roadmap of 200 megawatts of compute capacity across Europe by 2027.

The NVIDIA Blackwell platform is designed to help AI factories maximize throughput within fixed power budgets, combining higher performance‑per‑watt silicon with software features that boost data center throughput in power‑constrained environments.

Mistral is also working with French public investment bank Bpifrance, AI and advanced tech investment company MGX and NVIDIA to expand Campus AI, a network of AI factories anchored by a planned 1.4-gigawatt facility, making it one of Europe’s largest AI campuses. 

This momentum reflects a broader wave of AI infrastructure investment in France.

Scaleway, a European public cloud provider, now offers NVIDIA Blackwell B300‑SXM instances, giving developers and enterprises access to accelerated computing on demand. 

Bull and Foxconn have announced the production of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 in Europe. Systems will be manufactured and initially tested at Foxconn’s facilities in the Czech Republic before being assembled, integrated and fully validated at Bull’s factory in Angers, France. And a consortium of eight leading French companies has submitted a bid to host a European AI gigafactory in France to strengthen European AI infrastructure and accelerate AI adoption.

Meanwhile, Schneider Electric has teamed with NVIDIA to develop blueprints for gigawatt-scale AI factories, helping organizations accelerate AI infrastructure deployment.

Open Models Underpin AI Development

France’s AI ecosystem is producing models, datasets and platforms tailored to local languages, cultural context, and European business and regulatory requirements. As AI agents become more capable, organizations are increasingly adopting systems of models, using the right model for the right task to improve accuracy, reduce costs and accelerate outcomes.

On stage at this year’s VivaTech event, leaders from Gradium, H Company, LINAGORA, Pleias and NVIDIA explored the role of open models in enabling more transparent, customizable and locally relevant AI for governments, enterprises and developers.

“What we see now is a shift from building one isolated model to running continuous model infrastructure, where models train the next models, curate data, generate synthetic environments and verify reinforcement learning,” said Pierre-Carl Langlais, chief technology officer of Pleias. “Open model infrastructure is simply the way to ensure that many people can build AI and frontier-level practice can disseminate throughout the entire economy.”

The discussion underscored a key theme: combining open models with energy‑efficient infrastructure gives organizations the control they need to inspect, adapt, deploy and audit AI that meets Europe’s compliance and trust requirements.

NVIDIA Nemotron is advancing this with open models, datasets and playbooks that help model builders accelerate workflows from training to deployment.

• Mistral, a founding member of the NVIDIA Nemotron Coalition — a network of AI builders collaborating on open frontier models — is contributing model-development expertise and multimodal capabilities to help advance open frontier models through open collaboration.
• LINAGORA is building multilingual large language models with strong focus on the French language with its Luciole model family, developed using NVIDIA Nemotron and NeMo libraries and designed for local language and cultural context. Luciole 1B, 8B and 23B were pretrained on Jean-Zay — one of Europe’s most powerful and eco-efficient AI supercomputers — in collaboration with CNRS/IDRIS in the frame of the OpenLLM-France project. These open source models are distributed on Hugging Face (OpenLLM-France) along with their pretraining datasets. 
• H Company, also part of the Nemotron Coalition, is developing Holotron, a family of AI agents built on open NVIDIA Nemotron models. These computer-use agents can interact with any software interface in the same way a human would, without needing application programming interfaces or custom integrations, and automate complex enterprise workflows from end to end.  
• Pleias, in collaboration with NVIDIA, developed Nemotron-Personas-France and Nemotron-Personas-Belgium, privacy-preserving synthetic persona datasets grounded in French and Belgian demographics and cultural context. The startup is also using Jean Zay train compact language models entirely on open, well‑documented datasets, making it easier for customers to address EU AI Act requirements around data provenance and transparency. The team is now building specialized versions for search, retrieval-augmented generation and public sector document workflows.

AI Production Pays Off

The shift from pilot to production is the defining story of the past year, as organizations across every major industry in France use AI to boost efficiency, quality and speed.

Initiatives like the collaboration — announced at Adopt AI — between AI Factory France (AI2F), led by GENCI, NVIDIA Inception and NVIDIA Connect programs are helping startups gain access to national supercomputing resources, including Jean Zay. Early participants, including Pleias, Nebula and Ryax Technologies, are already turning that access into deployable applications.

In healthcare, Sanofi is deploying AI agents across the value chain, from research, manufacturing and commercial to daily operations like procurement and IT, helping teams automate complex workflows at global scale. The company is also working with startups Owkin and Biolevate to develop autonomous agents for drug discovery and development.

Orange Business, the B2B subsidiary of telecom company Orange, adopted a lead-with-internal-use approach by first testing and scaling its Live Intelligence GenAI platform internally, with more than 100,000 active users across the company. At the same time, Orange Business made the platform available as a trusted agentic AI solution, enabling businesses and public sector organizations across Europe to adopt AI securely while keeping data hosted within the region.

Stellantis announced a strategic initiative to advance AI-enabled digital twins across its global manufacturing footprint, powered by real-time data, simulation and AI, to improve efficiency, quality and operational decision-making. Dassault Systèmes is combining virtual twins with AI infrastructure and open models on its agentic 3DEXPERIENCE platform, powered by science-validated industry world models that enable the design, simulation and operation of complex systems with confidence. This establishes a secure and trustworthy foundation for industrial AI, helping scale innovation across the generative economy.

TotalEnergies is building Pangea 5, a next-generation supercomputer developed with Dell Technologies and NVIDIA that will increase the company’s computing power to support seismic imaging, advanced simulation and AI-driven research in the energy sector.

L’Oréal is using its CreAltech platform to combine generative AI and 3D digital twins, helping creative teams scale content production while maintaining brand consistency, quality and responsible AI practices across global markets.

France’s trajectory has moved from announcing its AI ambitions to deploying the infrastructure, models and applications needed to realize them. As new AI factories come online and adoption accelerates across industries, the country is emerging as one of Europe’s most active environments for AI development.

The foundations are in place. What gets built on top of them is just getting started.

Join NVIDIA at VivaTech 2026 in Paris, running June 17-20.