Investments at the Choose France Summit

On Monday, May 19, 2025, President Emmanuel Macron welcomed more than 200 business leaders to the 8th Choose France summit at the Château de Versailles. Designed to host a majority of foreign investors, this edition is held under the theme "France, land of creativity". With 37 billion euros in announced investments, France set a record compared with previous editions this year. Here is a recap of this major turning point for French economic attractiveness.

Since its creation in 2018, the Choose France summit has enabled the creation of more than 163,000 jobs thanks to investments reaching 46.9 billion euros. This 2025 edition alone shows a total of 37 billion euros, including 20 billion from new investments, which will subsequently allow the creation of just over 13,000 direct or indirect jobs. Thanks to this success, France ranks for the 6th consecutive year as the most attractive country in Europe for international investors according to the EY barometer.

This edition is particularly focused on Artificial Intelligence, at the heart of the digital revolution. Many companies have formalised their investment: 6.4 billion dollars from US-based Prologis for the construction of a data center, an initial payment of 8.5 billion euros from the Emirati investment fund MGX for the construction of an AI campus in Île-de-France, 10 billion euros from Canada''s Brookfield for a site in the Cambrai area, and 2.3 billion dollars from US-based Digital Realty for data centers in Marseille and Dugny in Seine-Saint-Denis. In parallel, several international players aspire to set up on French soil, such as the giant Revolut with its one-billion-euro project to build a headquarters dedicated to Western Europe in Paris, or the opening of a Paris branch of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF. It should be noted, however, that many other investments are expected in the wake of the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence on February 10 and 11, 2025. As a reminder, 109 billion euros had already been pledged on that occasion, leading today to the announcement of a joint venture project between BPIFrance, MGX, Mistral AI and NVIDIA. This project aims to build the largest AI campus in Europe in Île-de-France, with a capacity of 1.4 GW.

Other investments were also announced, such as 300 million euros from Amazon and a 3.4 billion-euro contract between MSC Cruises and the port of Saint-Nazaire for the construction of two cruise ships. However, this summit was also political. Alongside the investment announcements, President Emmanuel Macron also called for the removal of the European directive on the duty of vigilance. Creating excessive constraints on value chains and disadvantaging European companies against their American or Chinese competitors, this directive should, in his view, be revised. He therefore advocates a moratorium or an outright abandonment of the text.

It will therefore take several years to see the real impact of these announcements.