AI isn’t decided in the models, but in everything that makes them possible
Last Friday, I was at EuraTechnologies, in Lille (northern France), for the “IA avec Nous” Summit, France’s Act II on AI after Paris, as France holds the G7 presidency and just days ahead of the Evian summit.
A dense day, at a moment when the market is reorganizing. Here is what I took away.
– João Santos Calhas, International Director.
Learnings.
1. The debate has moved up a level.
Anne Le Hénanff, France’s Minister for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, put forward the idea of a French third way: neither dependence nor isolation. But the most striking contributions weren’t about models. They were about everything that makes AI possible: decarbonized electricity, data centers, networks, territories. The real subject isn’t the models — it’s everything that enables AI to run.
2. The Hauts-de-France region is embracing an infrastructure ambition.
The “Hauts-de-France” region (the area north of Paris, whose capital is Lille) now claims the status of an “AI valley.” Its president, Xavier Bertrand, says he has secured 6.5 gigawatts of compute capacity : the equivalent of six nuclear reactors.
SoftBank plans to invest up to €75 billion in AI data centers in France; together with Canadian fund Brookfield, €55 billion is earmarked for the Hauts-de-France region alone. The region’s strengths are tangible: industrial brownfield sites already connected to the grid, decarbonized energy from the Gravelines nuclear plant, strong interconnection through undersea cables. And a clear stance: the region intends to choose its partners rather than roll out the red carpet for everyone. AI has become as much a question of regional planning and sovereignty as of technology.
3. Sovereignty moved beyond the realm of slogans.
Octave Klaba set out OVHcloud’s ambition: to cover the entire chain : from physical infrastructure to technological infrastructure, through to usage frameworks and token provision. Truly sovereign AI means mastering all these layers, not just the model. He also pointed to a little-known reality: most of the open-source models considered sovereign in France are in fact non-European in origin.
I’ll be at VivaTech this week, where OVHcloud is expected to make further announcements. A topic well worth watching.
4. The place of the human is becoming a question of governance… and of philosophy.
The Mulliez group presented the charter governing the relationship between people and AI within the company: an AI at the service of people, and the clear principle that an individual will never be reduced to a mere data point. Beyond technology, this is an ethical requirement that large organizations will need to formalize. I also took part in an exchange on the anthropological impacts of AI (what it shifts in our relationship to work, to knowledge, to what makes us distinctly human) which I won’t unpack here, but which genuinely gave me a lot to think about.
It’s the kind of subject that deserves longer conversations, and I’d be glad to have them with anyone these questions speak to.
CHALLENGE.
We talk about models, when the real challenge is everything that makes AI usable.
AI in production isn’t a data-science problem; it’s a matter of network, security, observability and cost control.
I paid close attention to the contribution from Michel Lutz, CDO of TotalEnergies (a group we have supported at CNS for over fifteen years on its major IT infrastructure challenges) on how AI is already embedded in its day-to-day industrial operations. That is precisely what we do: enable large international organizations to make AI work, at scale and over time.
And then the weekend came.
It delivered an illustration no one had anticipated: one of the most advanced AI models on the market was suspended overnight, following an US government decision. The provider is contesting it, and the matter is not settled. But the point is made: a critical service operated elsewhere can be interrupted by a decision one is not party to. What would the impact be if that model were already at the heart of a French company’s strategic operations?
Sovereignty was not a conference topic.
Ce week-end, elle est devenue une question très concrète de continuité opérationnelle.
Beyond my international responsibilities at CNS, this is a subject I believe should give us all pause. And it resonates directly with who we are: an independent company, for which strategic autonomy isn’t a slogan of the moment but a long-standing driver. The value of that independence becomes clearest the day others discover, abruptly, its cost.
This weekend, it became a very concrete question of operational continuity.
Written by
