SoftBank invests €75 billion in AI datacentres in France, pushing Europe into the hyperscaler game
In its largest European bet, Masayoshi Son's group allocates up to €45 billion in the first phase of a 5 GW network in Hauts-de-France, with EDF providing the Bouchain thermal site and Schneider Electric anchoring Dunkirk.
The announcement was made amid the choreography of the Choose France summit in Versailles and was formalised in a SoftBank Group statement dated 31 May. Masayoshi Son's group will allocate up to €75 billion, approximately US$ 87 billion, towards the construction of 5 gigawatts of AI datacentre capacity in France, with €45 billion released in the first phase for three sites in Hauts-de-France: Loon-Plage at the port of Dunkirk, Bosquel, and Bouchain. Full operation is anticipated by 2031 and has been declared by the company itself as its largest infrastructure bet on AI outside Japan and the United States.
The key to the deal is the Bouchain site. EDF announced on 30 May that it had selected SoftBank as the preferred bidder for a 400 megawatt datacentre built on the site of a former thermal power plant via lease, with the French state providing nuclear electricity under a long-term contract. The arrangement exempts SoftBank from the grid connection bottleneck that has stalled comparable projects in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Northern Virginia. "I am very impressed by the fact that Emmanuel Macron is so personally committed to ensuring France's economic success," said Son in an interview with La Tribune.
Why France has become the Japanese money construction site
The French grid is 70% nuclear, delivering low-emission baseload at a cost that competing countries simply cannot match. Stargate, the US$ 500 billion operation that SoftBank is conducting with OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX in the United States, is partly reliant on natural gas generation with queue times for turbines of between four and six years. In Germany, the exit from nuclear has inflated the marginal cost of electricity; in the UK, the National Grid signals that new connection requests for hyperscalers could take until 2032. For Europe seeking computational sovereignty, the French equation is the only eligible one.
Schneider Electric anchors the second piece of the mosaic. In the port of Dunkirk, the French energy management company will coordinate a robotised industrial cluster with two facilities: one factory operated by SoftBank, dedicated to the production of cabinets, and another operated by Schneider, dedicated to the integration of power modules. Minister Roland Lescure, responsible for the portfolios of Economy, Industry, Energy, and Digital Sovereignty, described the package as "a testament to President Emmanuel Macron's ambition to position France as a benchmark destination across the entire AI value chain."
The message to Germany, the UK, and the rest of the bloc
The move widens the gap between Paris and Berlin in the race for AI gigawatts. Germany's industrial production is under stress, and energy costs are estimated by EnBW to be more than double those of France for energy-intensive B2B customers. The SoftBank-EDF agreement confirms the thesis that AI sovereignty in Europe by 2027 will be a question of who has the reactor. In the UK, the Treasury is already calibrating incentives for small modular reactors in partnership with Rolls-Royce, but the operational timeline is 2031, at best.
The effect on India and Brazil is indirect, yet tangible. For TCS, Infosys, Capgemini, and Accenture, more European capacity means more delivery contracts in hard currency, with data residency clauses benefiting centres near Paris and Madrid. In Brazil, where Microsoft, AWS, and Google are expanding regions in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro with partially renewable energy, the European announcement pressures the ONS and the Ministry of Mines and Energy to unlock connections for AI datacentres, which are currently stalled by queuing times of up to four years. Itaú and Bradesco, who process AI workloads through global providers, gain a third jurisdiction option beyond the US and Ireland when the first phase comes online.
The point that no one can avoid anymore
The French agreement isolates two themes. The first is that the era in which American hyperscalers unilaterally defined where AI would be built is over: Son now operates with comparable weight to Microsoft, Google, and AWS in Europe. The second is that the critical asset for AI has become the reactor, not the chip. SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron remain necessary, but the frontier of capacity is already shifting towards those who sign long-term contracts with low-carbon generators.
The European Commission would prefer that the capital were European. The money has arrived from Japan.