Macron, Modi court tech CEOs in AI infrastructure race

Countries are scrambling not to fall behind in AI — and French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are leading a personal charm offensives to court tech CEOs.

The pair have ramped up moves to court leaders of the world’s biggest tech companies this year, as they look to secure investment and major AI infrastructure projects.

They stand out among the countries scrambling to develop the data centers and ecosystems needed to power the tech, for their use of personal relationships.

The French President hosted AI bosses at the G7 summit in June, and personally convinced SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son to invest tens of billions of dollars into AI data centers in the country.

Modi met with Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy last Thursday, and welcomed the U.S. tech giant’s “record $48 billion investment” in the country, of which $21 billion will be for AI and cloud infrastructure.

Modi last year met Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan, with all of them committing to help develop India’s AI ecosystem.

In May, SoftBank announced plans to build 3.1 GW of AI data centers in France by 2031, as part of a 75-billion-euro program to roll out 5 GW of AI data center capacity.

Macron requested a meeting with SoftBank’s Son to persuade him to commit to the project two months earlier, and the two exchanged texts as they hashed out the details, Son told CNBC in an interview.

Macron touted France’s power capacity — the country gets a large amount of its electricity from nuclear — and committed to securing the SoftBank projects 3GW instead of 2GW, the number the French premier first suggested, he added.

“His team, the government team is very supportive,” Son said. “His team and our team work in collaboration very well.”

Around the same time, Macron approached tech bosses to join a working lunch with world leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump, at the G7 conference in June, which France was hosting.

CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis all took part.

Other tech chiefs including France-based Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Canada’s Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Italian company Domyn’s Uljan Sharka, U.K. AI scaleup Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli and German-based Black Forest Labs’ Robin Rombach were also there.

Modi too hosted top U.S. tech leaders earlier this year at the Global AI summit in India, leading to commitments of hundreds of billions of dollars into Indian AI efforts.

“India does not see fear in AI. India sees fortune in AI. India sees the future in AI,” Modi said in his opening remarks…