Countries are racing to avoid falling behind in AI — and French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are leading a personal charm offensive to woo tech CEOs.
The pair have stepped up efforts this year to take executives of the world’s largest technology companies to court to secure investments and major AI infrastructure projects.
They stand out among countries striving to develop the data centers and ecosystems necessary to harness technology and leverage personal relationships.
The French president received AI bosses at the G7 summit in June and convinced them personally SoftBank Boss Masayoshi Son wants to invest tens of billions of dollars in AI data centers in the country.
Modi met with Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy last Thursday welcomed the US tech giant’s “record investment” of $48 billion in the country, including $21 billion for AI and cloud infrastructure.
Modi met Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella last year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan are all committed to contributing to the development of India’s AI ecosystem.
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Macron welcomes AI leaders
In May, SoftBank announced plans to build 3.1 GW of AI data centers in France by 2031, as part of a €75 billion program to introduce 5 GW of AI data center capacity.
Macron asked for a meeting with SoftBank’s son to convince him to commit to the project two months earlier, and the two exchanged text messages as they went over the details, Son said in an interview with CNBC.
Macron praised France’s energy capabilities – the country gets much of its electricity from nuclear power – and committed to securing 3 GW for SoftBank projects instead of 2 GW, the figure the French prime minister first proposed, he added.
“His team, the government team, is very supportive,” Son said. “His team and our team work very well together.”
Around the same time, Macron reached out to tech bosses to attend a working lunch with world leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump, at the G7 conference in June, which France was hosting.
CEOs like Sam Altman from OpenAI, Dario Amodei from Anthropic, Google Demis Hassabis from DeepMind all attended.
Other tech bosses including France-based Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Canadian Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Uljan Sharka from Italy’s Domyn, Victor Riparbelli from UK AI scaleup Synthesia and Robin Rombach from Germany’s Black Forest Labs were also in attendance.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center) takes a group photo with AI company executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (2nd R), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (R), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (2nd L) and Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang (L) at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026.
Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
India
Modi also hosted top U.S. technology leaders at the Global AI Summit in India earlier this year, which led to hundreds of billions of dollars in pledges for Indian AI efforts.
“India does not see fear in AI. India sees happiness in AI. India sees the future in AI,” Modi said in his opening speech at the summit in February, calling on global technology leaders to “design and develop in India” to deliver to the world.
Securing investments and partnerships to develop AI is a top priority for Modi. India does not yet produce cutting-edge chips domestically or have a groundbreaking base model that can compete with leading U.S. or Chinese models, so the country is widely seen as a laggard in the AI race.
The Prime Minister has encouraged global technology companies to invest in developing AI infrastructure and chips in the country.
Months before the summit, India secured Microsoft’s largest investment in Asia to help build the sovereign capabilities needed for India’s AI-first future, while Google announced a $15 billion investment in India to build the company’s world’s largest AI hub outside the US. To encourage hyperscalers to build AI data centers in India, Modi’s government has offered them long-term tax breaks.
It also encourages local companies to develop semiconductors in the country.
During Modi’s visit to the Netherlands in May, Dutch company ASML said it would supply advanced lithography tools and solutions for the 300mm semiconductor fab that India’s Tata Electronics is building. Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan, who met Modi last December, also came forward as a potential buyer for chips from Tata Electronics.
India relies heavily on foreign AI models and computer hardware, making its AI ambitions vulnerable to export control policies from other countries.
The recent rally in global AI stocks has completely bypassed India due to its lack of large-scale AI deployment, making Modi’s urgency to attract capital and technology obvious and all the more important.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/04/macron-modi-ai-infrastructure-tech-ceos.html
