The project was announced with great fanfare by the Elysée Palace in February 2025 during the AI Summit. Of the 109 billion euro investments pledged at the time for the construction of new digital infrastructure in France, nearly half was earmarked for a massive data center, located in the town of Fouju in Seine-et-Marne (45 km Southeast of Paris). “Campus IA,” as the project is called, was to be developed by a “consortium of Franco-Emirati champions.”

The investors include MGX, a sovereign wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi; public financial institution Bpifrance (i.e., the French government); the French startup Mistral AI; and the American chip designer Nvidia. The presentation documents also highlight “a network of industrial, energy, and academic partners (Bouygues, EDF, RTE, École Polytechnique, Sipartech), who contribute to the operational and scientific success of the project.” RTE, the public electricity transport operator, a subsidiary of EDF, is even listed as a co-manager of the project, in charge of the grid connection. The ease of connecting new data centers to a network powered by “carbon-free” nuclear electricity was one of the key arguments put forward by Emmanuel Macron during the Summit.

In recent months, consultations have taken place in Fouju, at the request of the developers themselves. During these meetings, as confirmed by several participants, they systematically refused to answer questions about the financial package, the shareholding, and the levers available to the French government and Bpifrance to guarantee the “sovereign” nature of the project, saying these were “trade secrets.”

A shareholding arrangement that raises questions

While the shareholders’ agreement is kept confidential, a quick search of the French corporate registry reveals some details about the project’s origins and the relative weight of the partners. The company Campus IA was established in April 2025 through a shell company at 3 Boulevard de Sébastopol, very close to Place du Châtelet in Paris. Its headquarters are still there today, as well as those of the thirteen (to this day) affiliated companies created for its financing.

MGX officially appears in official documents as the company’s sole shareholder in June of that same year, before welcoming Bpifrance, Mistral AI, and Nvidia as equity partners in December. There was another capital increase in March 2026, with the same partners. The documents, though partially redacted, still allow for a precise idea of the distribution of their equity stakes: 70% for MGX, 25% for Bpifrance, 4% for Nvidia, and 1% for Mistral AI.

For a project often described as “sovereign,” the Emirati fund retains firm control. Mistral AI’s purely symbolic stake—even as the alleged French leader of artificial intelligence has raised funds to invest in its own data centers—also raises questions. It is an MGX executive, Frenchman Thibaud Desfossés, a former McKinsey consultant, who has taken the helm of Campus IA and serves as its public spokesperson, promising that the future data center “will be an essential pillar of France’s digital and technological sovereignty.”

Oil money

MGX was founded in 2024 by the Emirati sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, which has been doing business with Bpifrance since 2014. In 2020, Mubadala contributed to the so-called “Lac 1” fund—which intended to acquire stakes in French companies in the name of “sovereignty”—and co-invested in vehicles dedicated to innovation in Africa. The French public bank and the Emirati fund also jointly acquired a stake in 2024 in the consulting firm Socotec, which is now one of the key partners in the Campus IA project. It’s a small world.

Is the Fouju giant data center, then, merely another case of French elites seeking money from Gulf oil monarchies to fund their projects? For several decades now, French officials have regularly resorted to using money from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates to balance the budgets of their major industrial projects or secure lucrative contracts for their leading companies, conveniently overlooking the undemocratic nature of these governments. In this case, however, the issue goes beyond just getting money from with an autocratic regime. For in addition to being controlled by the Emirati royal family, the MGX fund is closely linked to US tech giants and, more specifically, to the policy of massive (and self-serving) support for AI and cryptocurrencies initiated by Donald Trump since his return to the White House.

Close ties to Trump and U.S. Big Tech

MGX is one of the partners in the “Stargate” project launched by the U.S. president shortly after his inauguration. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are also part of the project, which involves investing $500 billion in the construction of new digital infrastructure across the United States.

In March 2025, the fund announced a $2 billion investment in Binance, a cryptocurrency company, using World Liberty financial, the “stablecoin” launched by the U.S. president and his family. Announced by the Trump family themselves, the deal was largely seen as a way to buy the White House’s favor. In September 2025, MGX was once again a key player, alongside Oracle and other investors, in the acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. branch—also a Trump priority.

MGX’s close ties to Big Tech and Wall Street extend beyond the U.S. president and his pet projects. Shortly after its creation in 2024, the Emirati fund announced a financial partnership with Microsoft and BlackRock to raise tens of billions of dollars to invest in digital infrastructure, particularly data centers, around the world.

According to financial databases, MGX has also participated in fundraising led by AI firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s company, xAI. It is, in fact, one of the major players in the current AI and data center frenzy spearheaded by the tech and finance sectors. This headlong rush pushes companies to go ever faster and ever further in the development of new massive digital infrastructures without concern for environmental and social impacts, with the increasing risk of creating a bubble whose burst would have consequences across all sectors.

From cracking down on opponents to building an AI empire

The profile of MGX’s other co-shareholder and co-founder alongside Mubadala, the company G42, is hardly less concerning. It is also based in the United Arab Emirates and chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, head of Mubadala and MGX and brother of the Emirati president and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. Its operational manager, the Chinese national Peng Xiao, is the former head of DarkMatter, a surveillance and cybersecurity firm linked to the Emirati security services. It was also involved in Project Raven, an espionage operation targeting other governments, dissidents, and human rights activists, revealed by The Intercept in 2016. The case of prodemocracy blogger Ahmed Mansoor, who was spied on through the hacking of a baby monitor, made the headlines at the time.

G42 is linked to another mass surveillance scandal, via the ToTok chat app, which is very popular in the Middle East. Before taking the helm of Emirati investment funds in 2023, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed served for ten years as an internal security advisor for the United Arab Emirates and, in that capacity, was directly involved in Project Raven.

G42 has developed a wide range of AI-based activities and applications, in digital and surveillance sectors as well as healthcare, space, and fossil fuels (in partnership with the national company Adnoc). Beyond its CEO, G42 employs Chinese developers, has worked with Sinopharm to produce the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, is suspected of collaborating with multiple entities linked to Beijing, and has invested in companies such as ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) and JD.com. These close ties with China have drawn the attention of members of the U.S. Congress, who have placed G42 on a list of companies subject to export controls, to prevent industrial espionage. This did not stop Microsoft from investing $1.5 billion in the Emirati company a few months later, and securing a seat on its board of directors.

Here too, Donald Trump’s return to the White House sped things up. In May 2025, G42 announced the launch of an Emirati “Stargate” in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Cisco. Two weeks after the news of a $2 billion investment in World Liberty Financial, the U.S. administration lifted the restrictions imposed by Joe Biden on exports of the most advanced microprocessors to the United Arab Emirates. Who was among the main beneficiaries of the lifting of these restrictions? G42. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed reportedly acquired a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial as early as January 2025 through another fund under his control.

Projects in Grenoble

G42 is present in France not only in the future data center in Fouju (indirectly, via MGX) but also in another data center project in Grenoble with the American company AMD and the French firm DataOne (which is in fact a subsidiary of an Ireland-based group). This project, which was also announced in February 2025 during the AI Summit, could eventually reach a capacity of 1 GW by bringing together multiple sites [1].

As it comes, Grenoble is the location of yet another major project launched with great fanfare by the French government and heavily funded by public authorities in the name of “sovereignty”. The so-called “Liberty project”, developed in partnership with the chips company GlobalFoundries, involves extending of the capacity of the ST Microelectronics factory in Crolles in order to produce next-generation semiconductors. The government directed 2.9 billion euros in subsidies towards the project in 2022. This support was the object of a scathing report by the French Court of Auditors, which highlights the poor management of the operation, the lack of an adequate socio-economic assessment, and the waste of public funds for lack of guarantees from GlobalFoundries, which appears to have abandoned the project.

The lead shareholder of ST Microelectronics, on behalf of the French government, is Bpifrance. The majority shareholder of GlobalFoundries, with over 80% of the company’s shares, is none other than the Emirati fund Mubadala. Thibaud Desfossés, now the public face of Campus IA, worked for GlobalFoundries before he was transferred to MGX in 2024. A small world indeed.