A year after NVIDIA GTC Paris, France's AI infrastructure plans are materializing. 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. France's position as one of Europe's leading destinations for AI infrastructure is being reinforced through billions in investment commitments via France 2030, the 2025 AI Action Summit and this year's Choose France Summit.

Mistral is building a new 44-megawatt data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel in northern France, with the first deployment already operational containing 18,000 NVIDIA GB200 systems. This represents the foundation for Mistral's roadmap of 200 megawatts of compute capacity across Europe by 2027. The NVIDIA Blackwell platform is designed to maximize throughput within fixed power budgets by combining higher performance-per-watt silicon with software features that boost data center efficiency in power-constrained environments.

Mistral is collaborating with French public investment bank Bpifrance, investment company MGX and NVIDIA to expand Campus AI, a network of AI factories anchored by a planned 1.4-gigawatt facility that will be one of Europe's largest AI campuses. Scaleway, a European public cloud provider, now offers NVIDIA Blackwell B300-SXM instances for on-demand accelerated computing. Bull and Foxconn have announced production of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems in Europe, with manufacturing and initial testing at Foxconn's Czech Republic facilities before assembly, integration and validation at Bull's factory in Angers, France. A consortium of eight leading French companies has submitted a bid to host a European AI gigafactory in France. Schneider Electric has partnered with NVIDIA to develop blueprints for gigawatt-scale AI factories.

France's AI ecosystem is producing models, datasets and platforms tailored to local languages, cultural context and European business and regulatory requirements. At VivaTech, leaders from Gradium, H Company, LINAGORA, Pleias and NVIDIA discussed open models' role in enabling transparent, customizable and locally relevant AI. Pierre-Carl Langlais, chief technology officer of Pleias, stated: "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. 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." Open models combined with energy-efficient infrastructure give organizations control to inspect, adapt, deploy and audit AI meeting Europe's compliance and trust requirements. NVIDIA Nemotron is advancing this with open models, datasets and playbooks for model builders.

The shift from pilot to production defines the past year as organizations across industries use AI to boost efficiency, quality and speed. Collaborations including AI Factory France, led by GENCI, combined with NVIDIA Inception and NVIDIA Connect programs, help startups access national supercomputing resources including Jean Zay. Early participants like Pleias, Nebula and Ryax Technologies are deploying applications. A similar collaboration between NVIDIA and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center connects local infrastructure with startups and public sector institutions across Europe.

Sanofi is deploying AI agents across research, manufacturing, commercial operations and daily functions like procurement and IT, automating complex workflows globally. The company collaborates with startups Owkin and Biolevate on autonomous agents for drug discovery. Orange Business, the B2B subsidiary of Orange, tested its Live Intelligence GenAI platform internally with more than 100,000 active users before offering it as a trusted agentic AI solution for European businesses and public sector organizations with regional data hosting. Stellantis announced a strategic initiative to advance AI-enabled digital twins across global manufacturing, powered by real-time data and simulation. Dassault Systèmes combines virtual twins with AI infrastructure and open models on its agentic 3DEXPERIENCE platform using science-validated industry models for designing, simulating and operating complex systems. TotalEnergies is building Pangea 5, a next-generation supercomputer developed with Dell Technologies and NVIDIA, increasing computing power for seismic imaging, advanced simulation and AI-driven research. L'Oréal uses its CreAltech platform combining generative AI and 3D digital twins to help creative teams scale content production while maintaining brand consistency, quality and responsible AI practices.

France has moved from announcing 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, with the foundations in place and construction just beginning. NVIDIA will be present at VivaTech 2026 in Paris, running June 17-20.