Xavier Niel’s Not Ready to Throw in the Towel on AI

French President Emmanuel Macron has plenty of tools to boost AI in his home country: Brainy engineers, a fleet of nuclear-power stations and a state that isn’t shy about promoting its own industries. Yet, arguably, his most powerful weapon on display at the Paris AI Action Summit was Xavier Niel, a former hacker turned telecoms billionaire whose growing ecosystem of startups and cloud infrastructure is pushing hard to keep Europe in a race dominated by the US and Asia.

While most of 57-year-old Niel's $8.8 billion net worth is derived from his telco business Iliad SA and real-estate firm Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield SE, according to Bloomberg analysis, he’s become a voracious backer of buzzy startups from H to Poolside to AI unicorn Mistral. He’s built temples to entrepreneurship in Paris from incubator Station F to free coding school 42. And he’s ramping up spending, from a €3 billion ($3.1 billion) investment in AI infrastructure at Iliad to financing nonprofit AI lab Kyutai alongside Eric Schmidt and shipping mogul Rodolphe Saade.