The iliad Group Plans €3 billion AI Investment across Europe
The iliad Group, a major telecommunications company based in Paris, has announced plans to invest €3 billion in AI infrastructure across Europe. The investment, which equates to approximately US$3.09 billion, will be allocated to data centres, computing power, research, and application layers.
The company announced its intentions ahead of the AI Action Summit that started on Monday in Paris.
Created in the 1990s, the iliad Group is now a major telecommunications company based in Paris, France. It prides itself on standing out as an innovative company operating in major markets across Europe, becoming Europe’s fifth-largest fixed broadband operator.
"For several years now at the iliad Group we’ve believed in the power of AI, which is why we decided to devote the necessary resources to it," shares Thomas Reynaud, CEO of the iliad Group.
"The reason we’ve taken so many initiatives over the past three years is because we know that it’s a decisive time, when our society’s future is being played out."
We look at some of the key initiatives announced as part of this billion-dollar investment.
OpCore and Scaleway: Supporting AI hyperscale development
OpCore, iliad Group's data centre subsidiary, will invest €2.5 billion to strengthen its position as a hyperscale data centre leader. The company operates 13 data centres and has formed a partnership with InfraVia, a private equity firm, to increase its capacity to several hundred megawatts in the short term.
This means that OpCore will be able to have several hundred megawatts of capacity in the short-term, with the Group’s long-term aim being to build several gigawatts of capacity across Europe.
Another subsidiary of the Group, Scaleway, is one of the largest AI compute capacities available commercially in Europe. The Group invested significantly into the company, with almost 5,000 top-tier GPUs available to offer to companies for training and use.
Scaleway's clients include Mistral AI, a French AI company, and Photoroom, an image editing application.
Some of the leading open-source models like Meta’s Llama, Kyutai’s Moshi and DeepSeek are available for businesses in a sovereign and secure cloud environment.
Free and Mistral develop leading AI assistant
In an unprecedented move, Free, iliad Group's mobile network operator, has partnered with Mistral AI to offer an AI assistant to its 15.5 million subscribers. The partnership will provide Free's customers with 12 months of free access to le Chat Pro, Mistral AI's premium AI assistant.
This move makes Free the first French telco to offer such a service to its mobile subscribers.
Thomas adds: "We’re investing €3 billion across the entire value chain – from data centres to computing power and open-science research and we’re democratising AI through our partnership with Mistral."
Kyutai: A dedicated lab for AI open science
Kyutai is Europe’s first private-initiative independent lab dedicated to AI open science. The iliad Group co-founded Kyutai at the end of 2023 with a €100 million (US$103.17m) investment.
In conjunction with this announcement, Kyutai launched Hibiki, a voice technology for simultaneous translation. Hibiki, which means "echo" in Japanese, translates speech in real-time while preserving the speaker's voice and adapting its pace to the semantic content of the source speech.
In order to cement its role in what it calls “building the AI universe”, the open-source model is a critical tool in the AI race and is now supported by industry-leading market players.
It also produces a simultaneous oral and written translation in the target language.
"Currently trained for translation from French to English, Hibiki is exceeding state-of-the art performance in this task, in terms of translation quality, speaker voice fidelity and naturalness," the company states. "Thanks to its simple inference process, it is compatible with real-time on-device usage.
"The iliad Group's substantial investment in AI infrastructure and partnerships demonstrates its commitment to becoming a leader in the European AI market."
By focusing on data centres, computing power, and innovative AI applications, the company aims to position itself at the forefront of AI development and deployment across the continent.
Thomas Reynaud concludes: "This launch marks a new milestone in voice technologies by opening up extraordinary opportunities for communication and accessibility."
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