Macron and Modi Are Personally Wooing AI Giants. Here Is What Each Country Is Offering.

The Pitch

Two of the world's major democracies have decided that waiting for AI investment to show up on its own is not a strategy. France and India are actively recruiting it, CEO by CEO.

Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi have spent a significant portion of 2025 and 2026 in direct, personal contact with the heads of the biggest technology companies on the planet. Heads of state are exchanging text messages with billionaires to close deals.

The results are real and measurable.

What France Is Selling

Macron's central selling point is nuclear power. France generates a large share of its electricity from nuclear plants, which means it can credibly promise the stable, scalable electricity supply that AI data centers demand in enormous quantities.

That pitch worked on SoftBank. According to CNBC, Macron personally requested a meeting with SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son and then negotiated the terms directly, including texting with Son as they worked through details. Son told CNBC that Macron committed to securing 3 gigawatts of power capacity for the project, up from the 2 gigawatts Macron initially floated.

In May, SoftBank announced plans to build 3.1 GW of AI data centers in France by 2031, part of a broader 75-billion-euro program targeting 5 GW of total AI data center capacity. Son told CNBC his team and the French government's team are working in close collaboration.

Macron also organized a working lunch at the G7 conference in June, which France hosted, bringing tech CEOs to the same table as world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis were there. So were the CEOs of Mistral, Cohere, Synthesia, Black Forest Labs, and Italy's Domyn.

That kind of convening power is itself a tool. Getting global AI leaders in the room together in Paris signals that France intends to be a hub rather than a spectator.

What India Is Selling

Modi's message is scale and speed. India has the population, the engineering talent, and increasingly the political will to absorb massive technology investment.

"India does not see fear in AI. India sees fortune in AI. India sees the future in AI," Modi said in February at the Global AI summit in India, urging tech executives to "Design and Develop in India."

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met with Modi recently, with the Indian government welcoming Amazon's $48 billion investment commitment to India, according to CNBC. Of that total, $21 billion is specifically for AI and cloud infrastructure.

Amazon is not the first. In 2025, Modi met with Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Intel's Lip-Bu Tan, and all three committed to investments in India's AI ecosystem. The February Global AI summit produced commitments of hundreds of billions of dollars in total.

The Legitimate Skeptic's Case

These numbers deserve scrutiny. Multi-year investment commitments announced at summits or in bilateral meetings are not the same as money already spent. Companies regularly announce headline figures that are contingent on regulatory approvals, market conditions, and project timelines that stretch years into the future. SoftBank's 3.1 GW France buildout runs to 2031. Amazon's $48 billion India commitment has no single delivery date attached. Critics who point out that pledge-to-delivery ratios in tech diplomacy are historically imperfect have a fair point.

There is also a reasonable concern about what host countries give up to land these deals. Power commitments, land allocation, tax treatment, and data-sovereignty terms rarely get disclosed in the press release. Macron promising SoftBank 3 GW of electricity capacity has real costs for French energy policy. The public has not seen the full terms.

That said, the underlying competition is real and the strategic logic is sound. AI infrastructure requires electricity, land, and regulatory cooperation that only governments can deliver at scale. Countries that fail to engage now may find themselves hosting the consumption end of AI without capturing any of the buildout investment or talent development that comes with it.

What This Is Really About

SoftBank, Amazon, and Google are looking for stable power, friendly regulation, and access to markets. France and India are offering those things in exchange for jobs, infrastructure, and technological capability that would otherwise go elsewhere.

The competition is global. The U.K., Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Japan are all running similar plays. The difference Macron and Modi are betting on is that personal relationships at the CEO level close deals that bureaucratic processes lose.

Son's description of his back-and-forth texting with Macron suggests that bet is not entirely wrong.

The open question is whether these relationships and headline commitments translate into operational data centers, local hiring, and genuine AI capability transfer, or whether they remain primarily useful as political optics for leaders who need to show they are not being left behind. The 2031 deadline on SoftBank's France buildout will be one concrete test of that.