10 FRANCE BOASTS EXCEPTIONAL ASSETS WHEN IT COMES TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Its excellent schools and universities enable it to train some of the worlds best engineers, who are often behind cutting-edge technologies. Businesses benefit from the scientific and engineering skills of talents trained in France , who have an international reputation. For exam- ple, France maintained its 7 th place position in the global ranking, and second in the European ranking, for publications at scientific conferences on artificial intelligence. France also stands out for its unique open source ecosystem, with emblematic projects like Mistral AI, Hugging Face and scikit-learn that are some of the worlds leading open source AI libraries. These initiatives are supported by leading public research centres such as the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA), National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Moreover, attractive tax schemes such as the research tax credit (CIR), the young innovative company (JEI) status and the French Tech Visa strengthen this dynamic ecosystem. Since 2018, many companies have chosen France to establish or expand their artificial intelligence laboratories, including OpenAI, Alphabet (Google), Tata Sons, Cisco, Criteo, DeepMind, Fujitsu, HPE, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, NaverLabs, Samsung, SAP, and Uber. Meanwhile, France had 590 arti- ficial intelligence start-ups in 2023 (up from 502 in 2021), which raised more than 3.2 billion in 2023 six times more than in 2018. Above all, France offers abundant, flexible and decarbonized energy at competitive prices thanks to its mainly nuclear power sector.
