French president Emmanuel Macron expressed support for the partnership between the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia and French AI startup Mistral during a high-profile panel at the Viva Tech 2025 conference.
Macron called the collaboration a “game changer,” and stated the project would bolster French technological independence and sovereignty with its own AI cloud, data centers and computing capacity.
The initiative, which centers around building AI data centers in France using Nvidia chips, would expand Mistral’s business mode, and enable the company — which is often considered “Europe’s OpenAI” — to transition from being just a model developer to a vertically integrated AI cloud provider.
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Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch stated he got this idea for a French AI data center after hearing from enterprise customers who were looking for a European provider alongside U.S. hyperscalers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
“We’re still doing models,” Mensch said, “but on top of that, we are going to be operating more of our software platform on digital assets that we’re deploying — and that we’re deploying together.”
This partnership is in line with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s vision. Huang had used the occasion to state his belief that national AI sovereignty is not just strategic — it’s existential.
“A country can outsource a lot of things,” Huang said. “But outsourcing all of your intelligence makes no sense. The intelligence of your country encodes, embeds its people’s knowledge, history, culture, common sense, values. The data of your country belongs to your country… like the land belongs to your country. You should find a way to learn how to harvest that data and transport that data into AI.”
Huang also revealed that he took Macron’s help to connect Mistral with France’s largest companies. “I was at the president’s office,” Huang said. “I told Mr. President that Arthur Mensch needs the support of the largest companies in France. And Mr. President says, ‘Who are they? Let me call them.’ And he called them.”
Macron also laid out his ambition for France to be able to manufacture semiconductors in the range of 2 nanometers to 10 nanometers. The smaller the nanometer number, the more transistors that can be fit into a chip, leading to a more powerful semiconductor. Apple’s latest iPhone chips, for instance, are based on 3 nanometer technology.
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Very few companies currently have the ability to manufacture this on a large-scale chief among them are Samsung, and Nvidia-provider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). Macron also touted a deal between Thales, Radiall and Taiwan’s Foxconn, which are exploring setting up a semiconductor assembly and test facility in France.
In February, Macron had said the country’s AI sector would receive 109 billion euros ($125.6 billion) in private investments in the coming years. He also mentioned that the Nvidia-Mistral deal was an extension of France’s AI buildout.
“We are deepening them [investments] and we are accelerating. And what Mistral AI and Nvidia announced this morning is a game-changer as well,” Macron told CNBC on Wednesday.