SoftBank said it will build a 5-gigawatt AI data center in northern France, an investment of up to 75 billion euros (about $85 billion), per reporting on the announcement. The scale puts it among the largest single AI-infrastructure commitments announced in Europe, and it lands the same week South Korea unveiled its own state-backed buildout. The AI capex race is now visibly a sovereign-and-corporate contest fought in gigawatts.
The number that frames the commitment is 5 gigawatts. For context, that is roughly the draw of five large nuclear reactors, dedicated to a single AI campus. US hyperscaler data-center campuses are now measured in the hundreds of megawatts heading toward the low gigawatts, so a 5GW European site is a step-change in single-location scale. The €75 billion figure implies SoftBank is financing not just the building and the GPUs but very likely the power generation and grid interconnect, which is where projects of this size actually get stuck. Announcing the capital is the easy part. Securing 5GW of firm power in France by the target date is the constraint that decides whether this ships.
The strategic read is that SoftBank is buying a position in the European AI-infrastructure layer that the US hyperscalers have not yet locked down. Masayoshi Son has been reshaping SoftBank around AI since the Arm relationship and the Stargate commitments, and a flagship European site extends that into a market where data-residency rules make a local operator valuable. The financing question is the one to watch: at $85 billion, this adds materially to the AI-linked debt load Morgan Stanley flagged heading toward $570 billion this year.
Bottom Line
5 gigawatts in one location is a scale European AI infrastructure has not seen. The capital is announced; the power interconnect is the real gate. Watch for the grid-connection agreement, not the groundbreaking photo.