• Infrastructure investors commit billions to French AI factories
• Nvidia CEO spreads the sovereign infrastructure gospel
• Fastweb + Vodafone launches AI agent

In today’s industry news roundup: Multiple infrastructure investors line up to pledge AI factory investments at Macron’s Choose France summit; Nvidia shares its AI infrastructure and employment thoughts to signal the opening of this year’s Computex show; Italian operator develops and launches its own AI assistant; and much more!

While SoftBank Group attracted the main attention at the Choose France investment summit with its headline-grabbing €75bn plan for AI datacentre deployments in France, other companies are also pumping major sums into the European country’s digital infrastructure. Paris, France-based private equity firm Ardian and energy infrastructure vendor Verne, one of Ardian’s portfolio companies, unveiled plans to invest €5bn in a digital infrastructure hub in the Île-de-France region (in and around Paris) that will be designed to “accelerate [the] development of Europe’s large-scale sovereign computing and AI capabilities”. The hub will “house a datacentre dedicated to notably high-performance computing (HPC), AI model training, and advanced industrial applications,” that will comprise more than 200 MW of capacity by 2030, have an ultimate target capacity of 500 MW, and “rely on France’s high-capacity energy infrastructure, powered by low-carbon electricity in close collaboration with RTE and the EDF Group.” Ardian noted that the hub “will be part of the sites supporting the AION consortium’s bid for a French gigafactory as part of the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative.” In May, Ardian, EDF and Orange were among a number of major French companies to join the AION consortium, which was launched last year by Scaleway, the cloud services division of the Iliad Group, with the aim of bringing together public, private and academic partners to “support the development of sovereign, high-performance infrastructure for AI in Europe.” 

Canadian infrastructure investor Brookfield, which was recently in the news for its plans to invest in Sweden and partner with Telia on sovereign AI developments, pledged it would increase the value of its AI infrastructure investment programme in France to €30bn, up from the €20bn it announced in February 2025. The investments cover an AI facility at E-Valley near Cambrai and a new AI factory at Escaudain.

AI-enabled customer relationship management (CRM) services giant Salesforce is to invest $2bn over the next four years in an AI Innovation Hub in Paris, “philanthropic support for AI education and workforce readiness”, and “the continued expansion of Salesforce’s customer and partner ecosystem across the country,” adding to its previous five-year commitment of $3.5bn. “We are proud to deepen our commitment to France with this significant investment,” stated Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce. “France has become one of the world’s great centres of AI innovation, combining extraordinary research talent, entrepreneurial energy and a strong commitment to trusted technology. We look forward to helping organisations across France and the region unlock a new level of agentic transformation.

Following on from plans announced last year with Nvidia and Mistral AI to build an AI datacentre near Paris, MGX, the UAE investment fund focused on AI and advanced technology, and French national investment bank Bpifrance said a second AI factory site that would command a €7.5bn investment would be selected soon.  

Another UAE digital infrastructure firm, Phoenix Group, and European datacentre investor DC Max are planning to pump €4bn into multiple datacentres around France, starting with an 18 MW facility near Lyon. 

Dutch AI factory operator Nebius, which recently took on Nvidia as an investor, is to invest up to €8bn to convert a former Bridgestone site into a 240 MW datacentre, though this was reported by Les Echos earlier this year.  

Nebius is one of the many AI factory developers namechecked by Nvidia in an announcement made by the AI chip, software and networking giant to coincide with the Computex show in Taipei, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote speech early on Monday. Nvidia noted that “AI cloud providers, telcos, sovereign AI builders and vertically integrated infrastructure providers are building AI factories with Nvidia to serve customers across frontier AI, enterprise AI, telecommunications, developer clouds and national AI programmes.” And if you’re wondering about the drivers behind the ever-increasing sovereign infrastructure investments being made across the world, then the voice of influential Huang is certainly one of them. “Every company and every country needs AI factory infrastructure to turn data into intelligence... Nvidia AI Clouds bring full-stack AI factories closer to the regions, industries and developers building the next generation of AI, from model training to real-time inference and AI agents that will transform how people and organisations work,” noted the CEO. Nvidia made a slew of other product announcements for Computex, while Huang shared his thoughts on why AI is creating, not killing, software jobs during his keynote speech, noted industry analyst Richard Windsor in his latest Radio Free Mobile blog.    

Italian telco Fastweb + Vodafone has launched Ross, a home-grown sovereign AI agent designed to “make people’s work easier by reducing the burden of operational and organisational tasks”. The agent, developed by NextMindLab, a start-up wholly owned by the Italian operator, “is a true personal assistant that can understand user requests, transform them into concrete tasks, and carry them out… it can independently manage emails, organise calendars, conduct in-depth research, draft documents, create websites in just a few clicks, monitor relevant news and plan complex activities,” noted Fastweb + Vodafone. The telco stressed: “Security and privacy are two of Ross’s key features. Its language models and infrastructure are located in Italy and comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] and the European AI Act. Data from conversations with Ross is never used to train AI models, whether they are proprietary or third party.” 

Liberty Global has appointed Stephen van Rooyen, the current CEO of Dutch telco VodafoneZiggo, as the CEO of Ziggo Group, the Benelux telecom operation that will combine two Liberty Group portfolio companies, VodafoneZiggo with Belgian operator Telenet, to form a company with 13 million customers and €6.6bn in annual revenues. Liberty Group announced plans to form Ziggo Group in February this year when it agreed to buy Vodafone Group’s share of the Dutch operation. John Porter will continue as the CEO of the Telenet operation once Ziggo Group is formed, while van Rooyen will continue as CEO of VodafoneZiggo alongside his new group responsibilities. Ziggo Group is expected to be listed on Euronext Amsterdam in 2027, with 90% of shares proposed to be distributed to Liberty Global shareholders and 10% owned by Vodafone, as a result of the pending acquisition of their 50% interest in VodafoneZiggo.  

– The staff, TelecomTV