SoftBank pledges €45B to build AI data centres in France!

SoftBank has committed €45 billion to build large-scale AI data centres across France over the next five years, in one of the largest single-country AI infrastructure pledges ever made by a private investor. The announcement signals a decisive bet on Europe as a serious contender in the global race for sovereign AI compute capacity.

The scale of the commitment dwarfs most national AI investment programmes and positions France — already home to Mistral AI and a growing cluster of frontier labs — as a potential continental hub for training and inference workloads. For SoftBank, the move extends Masayoshi Son's long-running thesis that AI infrastructure is the defining capital allocation of the decade.