As countries struggle to keep up in the AI field, French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are leading a personal appeal offensive to tech CEOs.
The pair have stepped up moves this year to courtroom leaders at some of the world’s biggest technology companies, aiming to secure investment and large-scale AI infrastructure projects.
These countries stand out among those rushing to develop the data centers and ecosystems needed to power technology to take advantage of personal relationships.
The French president welcomed AI executives at the G7 summit in June and personally convinced them: Softbank President Masayoshi Son plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in domestic AI data centers.
Mr. Modi met Amazon’s Chief Executive Andy Jassy last Thursday welcomed the US tech giant’s “record $48 billion investment” in the country, of which $21 billion will be invested in AI and cloud infrastructure.
Prime Minister Modi met Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella last year. google CEO Sundar Pichai and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan are all committed to supporting the development of India’s AI ecosystem.
President Macron hosts AI leaders
In May, SoftBank announced plans to build a 3.1 GW AI data center in France by 2031 as part of a €75 billion program to deploy 5 GW of AI data center capacity.
Macron requested a meeting with SoftBank’s Son two months ago to persuade him to work on the project, and the two exchanged text messages as they worked out details, Son said in an interview with CNBC.
Mr Macron touted France’s power supply capacity (the country gets a lot of electricity from nuclear power), adding that he was committed to securing 3GW, the SoftBank project, rather than the 2GW originally proposed by the French prime minister.
“His team, the government team, has been very cooperative,” Son said. “His team and our team work very well together.”
Around the same time, Mr. Macron approached technology company leaders to participate in a working lunch with world leaders, including US President Donald Trump, at the June G7 meeting hosted by France.
CEOs like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic google Demis Hassabis from DeepMind was also in attendance.
Other technology leaders in attendance included Arthur Mensch, CEO of France-based Mistral, Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canada’s Kohia, Urjan Šarka of Italian company Domin, Victor Lipalberg of UK-based AI scaleup Synthesia, and Robin Rombach of Germany-based Black Forest Labs.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center) poses for a group photo with AI company leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (right), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (right), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (left), and Meta Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang (left) at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026.
Ludovic Marin | AFP | Getty Images
India
Prime Minister Modi also hosted top US technology leaders at the Global AI Summit in India earlier this year, leading to hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on India’s AI efforts.
“India is not afraid of AI. India sees good fortune in AI. India sees a future in AI,” Prime Minister Modi said in his opening remarks at the summit in February, urging global technology leaders to “design and develop in India” to deliver to the world.
Securing investment and partnerships for AI development was a top priority for Prime Minister Modi. India is widely seen as lagging in the AI race because it does not yet produce cutting-edge chips domestically, nor does it have a frontier-scale infrastructure model on par with leading models in the United States and China.
The Prime Minister has encouraged global tech companies to invest in domestic AI infrastructure and chip development.
Months before the summit, India secured security microsoft’s Google announces $15 billion investment in India to build its largest AI hub outside the US, while making largest investment in Asia to help build the sovereign capabilities needed for India’s AI-first future To encourage hyperscalers to build AI data centers in India, the Modi government has offered long-term tax breaks to hyperscalers.
It also encourages local companies to develop semiconductors domestically.
During Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the Netherlands in May, Dutch company ASML announced that it would supply advanced lithography tools and solutions to a 300mm semiconductor factory being set up by Indian company Tata Electronics. Intel’s Lip Vu Tan, who met with Prime Minister Modi in December last year, has also registered as a potential buyer of Tata Electronics chips.
India’s heavy reliance on foreign AI models and computing hardware makes India’s AI ambitions susceptible to other countries’ export control directives.
The recent rally in global AI stocks has completely ignored India due to the lack of large-scale AI-related initiatives, making it all the more important as Prime Minister Modi’s urgency to attract capital and technology becomes clearer.
