The effort aims to lure top French AI engineers — who left to work for big tech firms — back to their home country, where they can build AI products to rival the likes of OpenAI, Niel said in an interview.
“We don’t want our cloud and AI to be based on algorithms or machines localized in other countries,” Niel said. The danger is being dominated by American or Chinese technology “because they have the means,” he said. Half of the investment will be allocated to an independent research lab in Paris, run by a nonprofit foundation. Codenamed “Sphere,” it will bring together top AI researchers and will be supported in part by Niel’s telecommunications group Iliad, parent of cloud-computing firm Scaleway, according to people familiar with the plan.
Iliad also invested in supercomputing capacity, including purchasing an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, equipped with 1016 Tensore Core H100 GPUs — high-end graphics cards designed for machine learning and generative AI.