Emmanuel Macron

Emmanuel Macron (born 1977) has been president of France since 2017, and no European head of state has bet harder on artificial intelligence. A former investment banker who came to office promising a “startup nation,” he has made AI the centerpiece of French industrial strategy — and of his argument that Europe must build rather than merely regulate.

Plug, baby, plug

In February 2025 Macron co-hosted the AI Action Summit at Paris’s Grand Palais with India’s Narendra Modi, deliberately rebranding the series away from the “safety” framing of Bletchley Park. Around the summit he announced €109 billion in private AI investment for France — calling it the French equivalent of America’s Stargate — and pitched France’s fleet of nuclear reactors as the clean-energy answer to AI’s power hunger, quipping that where America drills, France need only plug in. He has consistently championed Mistral AI, the Paris-based lab co-founded by Arthur Mensch, as proof Europe can field frontier players.

Macron pairs the boosterism with calls to simplify the EU’s AI Act implementation, warning that overregulation could leave Europe a customer of American and Chinese technology rather than a producer. Critics at the Paris summit — where safety researchers complained existential risk had been pushed off the agenda, and the U.S. and UK declined to sign the closing declaration — argue he traded governance for growth. His response is that Europe’s relevance in AI must be earned with gigawatts and capital first.