New Delhi, June 7 -- The venue was suitably grand. At the Palace of Versailles last Monday, Emmanuel Macron stood before some 200 of the world's most powerful corporate executives and announced that foreign companies had committed €93 billion in investments in France, the bulk of it earmarked for artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centres. "We are clearly bridging the gap we had in computing capacities in Europe," he told them. SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, seated nearby, said France's nuclear-powered electricity grid was the decisive factor. The raw material of the future, Son added, was intelligence - and France would help export it.

unveiled in Brussels three days before the Versailles summit - proposes barring foreign ...