When Emmanuel Macron launched Choose France in 2018, the promise was to convince international investors that France can once again become a land of industry. Eight years later, in the salons of the Palace of Versailles, the landscape has profoundly changed. The automobiles, chemical factories and logistics centers that dominated the first editions have given way to data centers, semiconductors, energy infrastructures and computing capacities intended for artificial intelligence.
This ninth edition, the last of the second five-year term of the Head of State in its international format, thus appears to reveal the transformation of French industrial policy. More than a summit devoted to economic attractiveness, Choose France has become an observatory of new global technological balances of power.
In nine editions, the Élysée boasts 230 projects representing 87 billion euros of investments. A trajectory that the executive presents as a demonstration of France’s return to international industrial competition.
For the 2026 edition, the government is once again announcing a record and not the least with the investment from SoftBank. Masayoshi Son’s Japanese group plans up to 75 billion euros of investments in infrastructure linked to artificial intelligence. The announcement alone crushes all the projects presented during the first editions of the summit.
Other emblematic investments revolve around this initiative. HPE and NVIDIA confirm the installation of an AI Factory Lab in Grenoble. Foxconn is strengthening its industrial presence in Angers around equipment intended for artificial intelligence servers. Schneider Electric is positioned in the Softbank data center value chain. Tekever continues its development in drones while Venturi Space chooses Toulouse to develop its space activities.
Taken in isolation, these projects seem heterogeneous, but they nevertheless tell the same story, the reindustrialization defended by the executive no longer relies primarily on traditional industries but on the infrastructures necessary for the computing economy.
While in the first years of Choose France, the announcements mainly concerned classic industrial establishments, research centers or extensions of production capacities, in 2026, the main amounts are concentrated around artificial intelligence, low-carbon energy, semiconductors and digital infrastructures.
The question is no longer just about producing domestically but is now about where the computing capabilities that will power the next generation of technology companies will be housed.
In this area, France has real advantages, with a nuclear fleet providing it with relatively carbon-free electricity. Some regions still have significant land reserves. Administrative procedures have been gradually simplified and the public authorities have increased the number of measures intended to attract international investors.
A strategy which has produced tangible results, and certain announcements from previous editions have actually reached the stage of official presentations. Three years after its announcement during Choose France 2023, the Neomat project gave rise to the laying of the first stone of a factory intended to produce active cathode materials for electric batteries. The partnership between Orano and the Chinese group XTC New Energy ultimately provides for several hundred jobs and production capacity intended for the European electric vehicle market, or even the semiconductor factory run by Foxconn, Thales and Radiall near Bordeaux.
But as the amounts increase, the difficulties of execution also become more visible.
A few days before this 2026 edition, the liquidation of Carbon served as a reminder of the limits of European industrial ambitions. Presented as one of the most emblematic projects of the renaissance of French photovoltaics, the solar panel manufacturer has failed to raise the financing necessary for the construction of its gigafactory. More profoundly, its leaders denounced the absence of a real European market capable of protecting the emergence of an industrial sector in the face of Chinese competition.
The case of Fluidstack also tells another side of the same problem. Just a few months after announcing a one-gigawatt data center project in Bosquel, in the Somme, for an amount of 10 billion euros, the British company has given up on this establishment. The announcement was, however, made a symbol during the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence to demonstrate France’s capacity to attract some of the most important computing infrastructures in Europe. A project which was fully in line with the 109 billion euros of investments put forward
If the amounts revealed at Versailles demonstrate real ambition, they also remind us that in the era of artificial intelligence, competition is played out in industrial execution, where financing, energy, supply chains and the ability to transform a promise into operational infrastructure meet.
This is probably the main lesson of this last edition of Macron’s second five-year term. Choose France has undoubtedly contributed to putting the country back on the map of international investors. But the experience accumulated since 2018 also shows that attractiveness is only the first step in a much longer process.
The true measure of success will not lie in the billions announced, nor even in the number of projects unveiled each year under the auspices of Versailles, but will be read in the factories actually built, the computing centers actually connected to the electricity network and the value chains permanently anchored on European territory.
Because at a time when global competition is moving towards artificial intelligence infrastructures, industrial sovereignty cannot be decreed, but built megawatt after megawatt.
