MGX and partners to expand Campus AI in France

Emirati technology investment company MGX has partnered with French and US companies to invest billions of euros to expand Campus AI in France.

Campus AI is a joint venture between Bpifrance, the French public investment bank; Mistral, a French artificial intelligence company and US chip maker Nvidia, the Abu Dhabi Media Office said in a statement.

The announcement was made at the Choose France Summit and witnessed by French president Emmanuel Macron and Khaldoon Al Mubarak, MGX vice chairman, Mubadala CEO and secretary general of the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council.

“MGX chooses France,” President Macron said on social media after the agreement was signed.

The Campus AI initiative will have an investment of €7.5 billion ($8.7 billion), making France the leading European destination for decarbonised AI infrastructure, he added.

The project aims to develop up to 3 gigawatts (GW) of compute capacity in the European nation.

The expansion follows progress at the original Fouju campus in north-central France. The first campus will host up to 1.4GW of computing capacity, which is expected to commence operations in 2028.

In October, a consortium that included MGX agreed to acquire US-based Aligned Data Centers from private infrastructure funds managed by Macquarie for $40 billion.

MGX is chaired by the UAE national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

In September 2024, the company joined the $30 billion Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, which will build data centres and energy infrastructure.

Further reading:

• Gulf-backed Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in race to $1trn valuation
• MGX in talks to join $20bn funding round for Anthropic
• UAE’s Core42 raises $550m to scale AI deployment in Europe and US