8 France: a global leader in artificial intelligence Building on the ambitious strategy driven by the French President since 2017, France is now positioning itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence. AN AMBITIOUS STRATEGY DEPLOYED SINCE 2018 Since 2018, France has been implementing an artificial intelligence strategy built around research, training and wide adoption of artificial intelligence by economic stakeholders. Some 2.5 billion has been deployed under the strategy to date, helping to bring about a leading global AI ecosystem . France in the artificial intelligence sector: More than 1,000 artificial intelligence start-ups that have raised money in France, including 1.9 billion in 2024; The leading global destination for foreign investments in artificial intelligence; The top host for the AI research hubs and decision-making centres of global leaders, such as OpenAI, Alphabet (Google), Tata Sons, Cisco, Criteo, DeepMind, Fujitsu, HPE, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, NaverLabs, Samsung, SAP, and Uber; Some of the worlds top champions, including Mistral AI, H, Hugging Face, PhotoRoom and Aqemia; 16 unicorns, including ContentSquare, EcoVadis, ManoMano, Meero, Mirakl, Payfit, Qonto and now Mistral AI; Some of Europes most powerful computing centres, both public (Jean Zay GENCI) and private (Scaleway, Outscale and OVH); Training and development of some of the worlds most powerful foundation models , including Llama 2, Llama 3 and Mistral Large. One of the greatest successes of the French artificial intelligence strategy has been to posi- tion France as a key actor in research. The strat- egy draws on excellent training, development of public and private computing power, and deploy- ment in all economic sectors. When it comes to training, the creation of four interdisciplinary artificial intelligence insti- tutes (3IA) has boosted French research by strengthening ties between public and private research and establishing 40 research chairs and 300 funded doctorate contracts; In computing power, the Jean Zay supercom- puter was created in 2019 and has supported more than 1,200 academic and industrial projects; Sectoral initiatives have helped structure and exploit data to transform public sector action in the health and labour fields, while defence and security projects have enjoyed significant resources.