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?
The answer is not simple, but the implications are clear: If Europe cannot level up in the hottest tech race in generations, startups and software engineers could increasingly up stakes for the U.S.—with long-term economic consequences. Adding poignancy to the conversation was the fact that much of France’s top tech talent has already done just that. Meta’s AI chief, Yann LeCun, who was back home in Paris for this week’s summit, is only one example of a cadre of French expats who are helping build empires for tech companies headquartered in the English-speaking world.
“We Europeans are not bad at innovating, and we are really good at research,” says Nicolas Miailhe, cofounder of the Paris AI startup PRISM Eval, who previously headed The Future Society in Cambridge, Mass., and who is French. “We are lacking the capitalistic firepower,” he says, referencing the mega-investments that have characterized AI in China and the U.S., but have been elusive in Europe.
At the summit, Macron aimed to refute that second point. On Monday he announced that France, which is struggling with record government debt, would plow €109 billion into AI, much of it from private sources. And at Tuesday’s closing session, he told the audience of leaders (including U.S. Vice President JD Vance) and CEOs like Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai, that his country was awash in tech engineers, thanks to well-funded public universities.
Many say that will not be enough—even if you ignore the fact that many of the engineers of which Macron boasted are now working in the U.S.
For years, of course, executives have wondered whether Europe’s more relaxed corporate cultures and strong commitment to work-life balance were at odds with blazing-fast tech advances and mega-sized investments. At an invite-only breakfast on Tuesday in the grand National Assembly building on the Left Bank of the Seine, about 40 seasoned American and French tech entrepreneurs and financial executives said tech founders in Europe appeared to lack the kind of all-consuming ambitiousness, and perhaps the get-rich-quick hunger, that has powered Silicon Valley for decades. The breakfast was organized by the Joint European Disruptive Initiative, or JEDI, which develops moonshot projects and funds advanced tech research.
The aggressive tech culture in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the U.S., some of those in Paris this week posited, clashes with Europe’s traditional bias against high financial risk, its hierarchical education systems, and its high taxes. Those factors, critics say, help deter top talent from going into “founder mode”: In France, which attracted the most AI investment of any European Union nation last year, generations of top graduates have opted to climb the ranks of corporations, rather than launch startups.
“You can create the conditions for breakthroughs, and the U.S. does that extremely well,” Emmanuel Candes, Stanford University’s chair of mathematics and statistics, who is French, said in an email to Fortune, explaining why so much French talent has left for the U.S. Candes, who was in Paris for the AI summit, graduated from École Polytechnique, France’s equivalent to MIT, then earned his doctorate at Stanford in 1998–and did not return home. “When you give a lot of freedom and resources to young people to do what they do best, you create conditions for finding the next moonshots,” he wrote.
The downsides of a risk-averse culture
Tech academics like Candes say they are struck by how many companies in the U.S. begin with graduate students pursuing their own ideas, and then landing seed capital. In Europe, by contrast, academia itself is more risk-averse, and that's yet another element contributing to a relatively thin pipeline of major-scale AI companies.
In several conversations at multiple events this week, investors and tech execs told Fortune that the E.U.’s privacy and environmental regulations, including its A.I. Act and the Digital Services Act, can also be limiting factors, or at least make those launching startups believe that their growth has limits. So too could fragmented financial rules across the E.U.’s market of 450 million in 27 countries.
This week’s gathering did little to smooth over the U.S.-Europe differences. Vice President Vance told the summit that Europe’s AI regulations could “kill a transformative industry just as it is taking off.”
Macron and E.U. Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen both promised a regulatory overhaul in order to speed up AI. “We must cut red tape, and we will,” Von Der Leyen told the summit on Tuesday. Yet both leaders made it clear they would not abandon commitments to privacy and climate action. “We must defend our way of life,” Macron said.
Despite France—and Europe—lagging behind, that “way of life” now includes a new generation of tech founders.
The week’s biggest event, in fact, was on Tuesday, when about 4,000 people, including investors and techies, poured into Station F, the giant tech hub in eastern Paris, which was opened in 2017 by billionaire telecom executive and investor Xavier Niel.
At an all-day round of fireside chats and panel discussions—and a late-night rave party—tech execs, investors and officials, including Macron, urged founders to grow their companies in Europe.
“One limit is ambition,” said Thomas Wolf, cofounder of the AI company Hugging Face, who also graduated from France’s École Polytechnique, before incubating his startup at Station F—and then establishing its main headquarters in New York. “We should not think, ‘I am building a French startup.’ You should think, ‘I am building a global company.’”
Antoine Blondeau, the cofounder of tech venture-capital firm Alpha Intelligence Capital, urged the crowd at Station F not to automatically go public on the NASDAQ. “You should think about European markets,” said Blondeau, who is French—and whose company is headquartered in San Francisco.
Cutting red tape will be a start, French Digital Minister Clara Chappaz, told the hordes inside Station F on Tuesday. “There is no way we can leave this technology in the hands of only a handful of countries,” she said. “France relies on you to build these companies here.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this story mistakenly included quotes from a session held under the Chatham House Rule. The article has been updated to remove those quotes.
