France believes its cheap, low-carbon electricity is Europe’s overlooked advantage in AI. A debate has now opened over that power. Should it go to homegrown AI firms, or to the American giants building data centres on French soil?
When the head of Europe’s biggest AI lab arrived at last month’s G7 working lunch on artificial intelligence, he did not come to talk about models. He came to talk about electricity. Arthur Mensch, the chief executive of Mistral AI, addressed the room on 17 June.
France’s relatively cheap power, he said, is a strategic asset the country risks squandering. His audience, as reported by Politico, included Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, and the chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI.
Mensch’s case is simple. Training and running AI takes vast amounts of electricity, and France, with its fleet of nuclear plants, has a surplus of it. “Electricity is the primary substrate”, he said. “You have to control the infrastructure, and Europe is relatively well-positioned.”
The risk, in his telling, is selling that power cheaply to others. “Either you sell that to Americans, who will resell it 10 times more expensively in the form of artificial intelligence”, he said, “or you transform it yourself.”
