- SoftBank Group has committed up to €75 billion to build 5 GW of AI data centre capacity in France, its largest infrastructure investment in Europe and one of the biggest single-country AI commitments ever made.
- Only €45 billion and 3.1 GW are firm; the remaining €30 billion and 1.9 GW are plans, not contracts, a distinction that matters given SoftBank’s net debt of $122.9 billion.
- The global AI data centre market was valued at $147 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $811 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 23.9%.
Masayoshi Son and Emmanuel Macron met when the French president visited Japan earlier this year. What followed was one of the largest infrastructure commitments France has ever received from a foreign company.
SoftBank Group, the Tokyo-based investment conglomerate founded by Masayoshi Son in 1981, has announced it will invest up to €75 billion to develop and operate 5 GW of AI data centre capacity across France. The deal was unveiled at President Macron’s annual Choose France summit. SoftBank employs over 65,000 people globally. Its most significant current holdings include a ~90% stake in Arm Holdings, whose acquisition by Nvidia was announced in May 2026, after which SoftBank will hold under 10% of Nvidia and a 13% stake in OpenAI following $64.6 billion in cumulative investment, as TFN has covered in depth across its reporting on SoftBank’s OpenAI bets and its $40 billion bridge loan.
What SoftBank is actually building
The commitment has two parts. The firm portion – €45 billion to deliver 3.1 GW of capacity – covers three sites in the Hauts-de-France region: Dunkirk (Loon-Plage), Bosquel, and Bouchain, all targeted for completion by 2031. The remaining €30 billion and 1.9 GW are described as plans for additional sites across France. SoftBank will develop the projects with SB Energy and strategic partners including Schneider Electric, which will co-develop a robotised manufacturing cluster at the Port of Dunkirk, and EDF, which will supply low-carbon electricity at the Bouchain site from a repurposed former industrial facility.
“AI is entering a new era, and the countries that build the infrastructure for this transformation will shape the future of technology, industry and society,” said Son.
Why France, and why now
France’s nuclear grid – the most reliable low-carbon electricity network in Europe – gives it a structural advantage over Germany and the UK, both of which face tighter energy constraints. Data centres are power-hungry: a 5 GW build at full capacity would consume more electricity than several European cities combined. SoftBank also cited France’s industrial land availability and engineering workforce as factors. The Dunkirk site’s proximity to London, Brussels, and Amsterdam positions it as a hub for Northern European enterprise demand. Europe’s race to build sovereign AI infrastructure is accelerating, a theme TFN has tracked through the rise of dedicated European AI data centre players such as Nscale andEcoDataCenter.
SoftBank’s track record and current leverage
SoftBank’s most celebrated bet – a $20 million stake in Alibaba in 2000 – returned roughly $70 billion at peak before the position was fully divested by mid-2024. It also acquired ABB’s robotics division for $5.4 billion in 2025 and injected $450 million into British chipmaker Graphcore. Its most painful miscalculation was WeWork, where SoftBank lost more than $10 billion. The company currently carries net debt of $122.9 billion per its fiscal 2025 results, and took a $40 billion unsecured bridge loan in March 2026 to fund its latest OpenAI follow-on – a loan that eight banks are now syndicating and whose 12-month maturity is widely read as a bet on an OpenAI IPO before March 2027.
Competitors in European AI infrastructure
SoftBank enters a market where hyperscalers are already moving fast. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have each committed multi-billion-euro investments in European AI infrastructure over the past two years. What differentiates SoftBank’s announcement is scale – no single company has announced a comparable AI infrastructure commitment to one European country and its pairing of data centre capacity with onshore manufacturing through the Schneider Electric partnership. SoftBank is also a partner in the $500 billion Stargate initiative with OpenAI and Oracle to build data centres across the US, a project TFN has covered as part of the broader $110 billion OpenAI funding round.
The market
The global AI data centre market was estimated at $147 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $811 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 23.9%. The global data centre sector is estimated to grow at a 14% CAGR over the next five years, with roughly 100 GW of new capacity expected to come online between 2026 and 2030, equating to $1.2 trillion in real estate asset value creation.
The bigger question
SoftBank’s announcement is extraordinary in scale but light on binding commitments beyond the first phase. The question Europe should be asking is not whether Masayoshi Son can write the cheque, it’s whether the demand, the grid, and the talent will be there to fill 5 GW of French data centres by the time they are built.
