The announcements, made ahead of the AI Action Summit taking place in Paris, saw the French giant showcase investments it said would reaffirm its ambition to be a market leader in AI in Europe.
Chief among the investments includes €2.5 billion from Iliad’s data centre subsidiary OpCore to create several gigawatts of capacity as part of a new partnership with private equity firm InfraVia.
OpCore and InfraVia plan to scale “several hundred megawatts of capacity” in the short term to provide AI computing resources to European businesses with a long-term view to build several gigawatts of capacity.
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Illiad's investment projects also include its B2B cloud subsidiary, Scaleway, which is expanding its AI computing capacity to become the largest available in the commercial market in Europe.
Scaleway has added around 5,000 GPUs to provide enterprises with powerful hardware to train and run inference for their AI models. No specific on what brand these “top-tier” GPUs were disclosed, however, Iliad said that French AI startups including H, Mistral AI, and Photoroom are using Scaleway’s platform.
In addition to investments, Iliad’s Free brand has partnered with Mistral to offer mobile subscribers an AI assistant for 12 months free of charge.
Subscribers will have access to the premium version of Mistral’s le Chat app on iOS and Android devices, which usually costs €17.99 a month to power both productivity and search queries.
Thomas Reynaud, CEO of the Iliad Group, said: “For several years now at the Iliad Group we’ve believed in the power of artificial intelligence, which is why we decided to devote the necessary resources to it.
“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.”
Beyond investments and partnerships, the Iliad co-founded non-profit AI research lab Kyutai unveiled a new voice solution earlier this week.
Dubbed Hibiki, which means echo in Japanese, the tool translates a speaker’s voice in real-time, producing both an oral and written translation in a desired language.
Hibiki can run on-device given its simple inference process, meaning translation times are significantly reduced had Kyutai run it via the cloud.
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