The race to build Europe's artificial intelligence future sets up a home in Paris this week, as the city's flagship tech conference VivaTech becomes a magnet for global technology giants who see France as a key to building AI on the continent.
The event has grown from a 45,000-person gathering into Europe's largest startup and tech conference, drawing over 200,000 attendees from 170 countries. This year, it carries more geopolitical weight than ever, with AI sovereignty and infrastructure dominating the agenda.
Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn and French computing firm Bull announced a partnership on Thursday to build powerful AI computers in Europe to power the continent's fast-growing network of AI factories, the large-scale computing centres that form the backbone of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
“France is one of the biggest countries in Europe with quite a lot of talent… We also know that France is very good at high-tech and especially in the space industry,” Foxconn’s vice president and spokesperson James Wu told Euronews Next.
“France has very great ambitions in solving AI projects and we believe we can create a very important role to help France achieve that goal,” he added.
