The worldwide race for artificial intelligence (AI) domination unfolded on three continents almost simultaneously this week.
While Vice President JD Vance used his first foreign speech to claim U.S. dominance and pressed European nations to back off “excessive regulation” that “could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” French President Emmanuel Macron pledged $112 billion of private investment in the “coming years” to accelerate AI development on the continent. [Late Tuesday, the European Union announced InvestAI, a roughly $206.6 billion initiative that includes a new European fund of $20.7 billion for AI giga factories.]
Apple Inc., meanwhile, was finalizing plans for an AI push in China via a partnership with e-commerce giant Alibaba to prop up sagging iPhone sales in arguably its most important country outside the U.S. The company chose Alibaba over Baidu, DeepSeek, Tencent, and ByteDance to bring its Apple Intelligence platform to China, according to a report in The Information on Tuesday.
Vance’s address at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday underscored President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda and closely follows an executive order by Trump last month that repealed former President Joe Biden’s own executive order to manage AI’s national security risks among other things.
“I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety,” Vance said. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”
Besides promises of AI deregulation and a wide-open merger-and-acquisition landscape, the crown jewel of opportunities is arguably Stargate, a $500 billion private AI investment project in the U.S. over four years backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle Corp. announced at the White House with Trump last month. While derided by Elon Musk for its funding model, the behemoth infrastructure seized the attention of Macron.
“I can tell you this [Sunday] evening, Europe is going to speed up, France is going to speed up,” Macron said in a TV interview on France 2 and India’s First Post. He called the massive investment package “the equivalent for France of what the United States announced with Stargate.” Most of the investments will go toward new AI-focused data centers.
French financing includes commitments from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), American and Canadian investments funds, and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange.
Preceding the AI Action Summit, the UAE said it would plow between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros ($31.1 billion and $51.5 billion) for the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France.
Stateside, in recent weeks, Big Tech players Amazon.com Inc. ($100 billion), Microsoft Corp. ($80 billion), Google ($75 billion), and Meta Platforms Inc. ($65 billion), all vowed massive capital investments to primarily expand AI operations over the next year during their quarterly earnings calls.
Conspicuously absent from the mix was Apple, which has lagged its rivals in AI development.
But its partnership with Alibaba should ease some uncertainty in China, where the iPhone maker has been losing market share to domestic rivals and a resurgent Huawei whose smartphones have featured AI tools since last year.
Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the lack of Apple Intelligence as a key contributor to a 11% decline in iPhone sales in China. Apple says it plans to introduce AI features in non-English speaking markets, including China, in April.
“China has become a more competitive market in recent quarters, so it is encouraging to see some positive developments given many expected securing regulatory approval for AI features to be a challenge,” Evercore IS analyst, Amit Daryanani said in a note.
