This week’s AI Action Summit in Paris drew hundreds of tech founders and industry titans, including execs from Meta, Google, and OpenAI, and more than 40 heads of state and government. It bookended a year in which French President Emmanuel Macron played maître d’ to the world, from last summer’s Olympic Games to Notre-Dame’s reopening in December.
But at a conference where Macron made an earnest pitch for France to be a global AI hub—backed by a €109 billion ($113.6 billion) financial commitment—the talk on the sidelines was sobering. At the ornate summit venues, late-night dance parties, and other events Fortune attended, American and French tech founders, investors, officials, and academics grappled with one question: Will Europe forever be relegated to a lesser role in AI, outspent and outpaced by the U.S. and China?
