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PARIS — When the CEO of Europe’s only real challenger to the top U.S.-based frontier labs arrived at last month’s exclusive G7 meeting on AI, he didn’t have algorithms or IPOs on his mind. He came to talk electricity.

Arthur Mensch, who runs Mistral AI, the hottest tech property of this year’s G7 host country, believes that France’s relatively cheap energy is a major competitive advantage in the AI race.

It’s a vision he laid out at the June 17 working lunch on AI in front of the likes of Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, as well as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI boss Sam Altman: Unless Europe develops a system to direct its low-cost electricity resources into large language models of its own, it risks letting its energy advantage slip away.

“Electricity is the primary substrate,” he told POLITICO in a phone call after the lunch in the French lakeside town of Évian-les-Bains. “You have to control the infrastructure, and Europe is relatively well-positioned.”

It is a pitch he’s busy directing at his home country of France, whose low-carbon energy is highly sought after by American tech giants. “Either you sell that [electricity] to Americans, who will resell it 10 times more expensively in the form of artificial intelligence; or you transform it yourself in order to keep most of the value and carry out R&D,” said Mensch, who has made the same point to the French government.

His argument is that Europe possesses the largely overlooked strategic asset of relatively abundant affordable energy, but it risks being sucked up by American tech companies. “In two years it will be too late,” he warned French lawmakers at the National Assembly in May.

Mensch isn’t the only one concerned. The topic was on the agenda of a closed-door June 15 meeting at the Élysée Palace organized by French Digital Affairs Ambassador Clara Chappaz and Grégoire Potton, head of political affairs for the French presidency.

Behind the official theme — “the attractiveness strategy for digital infrastructure projects” — talks turned to which data center projects should be prioritized on French soil, at a time when global AI companies are racing to expand their computing capacity. “What emerged is that the Élysée is extremely worried about the bad buzz that [this issue] could create around data centers,” said one AI expert who received a readout from the meeting.

A supercomputer investment promised by Japanese-owned SoftBank alone, planned for northern France and announced at the Choose France summit in late May, is ultimately expected to consume between 3 and 5 gigawatts of electrical capacity. The total capacity currently allocated to all of the country’s data centers is less than one gigawatt.

While AI companies are racing to build computing power, France has positioned itself as a haven for investments, betting on the energy surplus that comes with its nationwide network of nuclear power plants. In the face of deindustrialization, the country is also eager to encourage new data center construction projects.

Enter the campaign

The debate first emerged in 2025 following France’s AI Summit and its promise of €109 billion in investments in the country, mainly from foreign companies — encouraged by French President Macron’s slogan: “Plug, baby, plug!”

But the issue has sharpened since Mensch took it up. Appearing before the National Assembly in mid-May, the Mistral CEO warned of the risk of a “monopolization of Europe’s energy resources” by companies that are not necessarily European and would capture “90 percent of the value.”

Arthur Mensch attends the VivaTech technology startups and innovation fair in Paris on June 11, 2025. | Pool photo by Sarah Meyssonnier via AFP/Getty Images

While national champion Mistral wants to build its own infrastructure in the name of sovereignty, it too has benefited from non-European investment, notably €30 billion to €50 billion through the Emirati fund MGX to build an “AI Campus,” in partnership with graphics processor leader Nvidia and French state investment bank Bpifrance.

“A year ago, we didn’t even appear on the data center map; everything moved very quickly and we had to bend over backwards to make it happen,” said Nicolas Dufourcq, head of Bpifrance, while admitting that the situation could evolve. “Going forward, I think we could indeed imagine reserving around 20 percent of capacity for European players.”

The issue has now found its way into the platforms of presidential candidates ahead of the 2027 ballot. Many of them, from Édouard Philippe to the Greens, as well as Dominique de Villepin and the National Rally, advocate some form of preferential access to French electricity for French or European companies.

Several regions also intend to adapt their policies so local companies can benefit. Xavier Bertrand, president of the Hauts-de-France regional council, said he was “negotiating” with project developers so regional businesses and research and educational institutions would have “easier and guaranteed access to computing power.” In its strategy adopted June 25, the Île-de-France region around Paris stated it wants to “ensure that these facilities generate tangible benefits in terms of jobs, economic activity, innovation and energy valorization.”

As for French energy giant EDF, it has made data centers central to its commercial strategy for selling excess electricity, notably by making land available. In its first allocations it favored French players: Of its four calls for expressions of interest, three went to France’s Eclairion, Mistral and OpCore, while the fourth is expected to go to SoftBank.

Take it or leave it

Other French companies are reluctant to exclude American firms because they benefit indirectly from their investments in constructing data centers, even though the sums involved represent a fraction of the total cost of such projects.

“A data center is like an ultra-digitalized factory. It is not a reservoir of jobs in itself, but you have to look at the entire ecosystem around it: construction workers, installers, equipment suppliers, technicians, security personnel,” said Hélène Macela, vice president of Schneider Electric, who maintains it’s better to host data centers in France than see them move abroad.

Her group is planning to build a factory alongside SoftBank’s giant data center to manufacture equipment on a continuous basis.

Business France Deputy CEO Guillaume Basset also takes a pragmatic view, noting that projects supported by his organization are often tied to partnerships with industrial companies.

“It’s a race against the clock: When the train passes, it won’t come by twice,” he concluded, while also noting that foreign companies “generally have an interest in concentrating their investments in a single country.”

Nicolas Camut contributed to this article.

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day brings Tom Holland's Peter Parker back for a new adventure. Set after the harrowing events of No Way Home, the world has forgotten who he is but that doesn't mean the threats have stopped as a new invisible villain is lurking in the shadows.

The latest movie marks the fourth outing for Holland's webslinger, who straddles the world of Sony's Marvel universe and the MCU. However, he's by no means the only Spidey-adjacent character on our screens. There are the Spider-Verse animated movies, Nicolas Cage's variant in Spider-Noir, and there's the Venom, Madame Web, and Morbius movies too.

Speaking in the new issue of SFX magazine , producer Amy Pascal teased that she thinks there are plenty more stories to tell in this universe too, but they have to be justified.

"You don't want to just keep exploiting the same character," Pascal explained. "I think that would make it unspecial for the world. So there are other things in the Spider-Man universe that I think are really fun for us to explore, because the comics were so varied and so creative. I think Peter Parker should exist in live action, and I love what we're doing with Miles in the animated movies. We just have to be really careful that we're being smart about all this."

At the moment, the only other Spider-Man movie that's confirmed is the upcoming third film in the Spider-Verse trilogy, Beyond the Spider-Verse . There are some more animated stories being developed based around Spider-Punk and Spider-Gwen and it's unclear whether Holland will be back again as Parker in the future.

It seems only time – and potentially the events of Brand New Day – will tell what's next with the character on our screens.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters in the UK on July 29 and the US on July 31. For more, check out our guides to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows on the way, as well as our breakdown of how to watch the Marvel movies in order .

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Last month at the PC Gaming Show we got to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at Total War: Warhammer 40,000 including glimpses of a battle between the Astra Militarum and orks. The video above, revealed at BiliBili World, is a more detailed look at the same battle in the Armageddon Theatre campaign, and looks sick as hell.

Though I'm not convinced my PC will be able to run it. Seeing the framerate drop when the explosions go off and limbs start flying through the air has me looking at my wallet in concern.

While the spectacle looks neat, once again the part I'm most interested in is the cover system. A couple of minutes into that video, you can see the player send infantry into barricades and it looks like they dynamically split into smaller squads to suit the cover available, and to take advantage of cover provided on the upper storey of a ruined building.

Then the ogryns come along and stomp through a bunch of it. Like the sentinel walkers in an earlier part of the footage, the hefty lads trash barricades they pass through while the regular infantry are animated vaulting over them. Looks like we'll have to be careful to maneuver around any protection we want to preserve for the sake of keeping the little guys alive.

Though maybe that's not in character. As the narrator says watching a barrage rain destruction on one and all, "These men did their duty." The average Imperial Guardsmen has an estimated life expectancy of 15 hours in combat, and once you've done your duty tying down enemies with jump-packs long enough for the artillery to load, well, both you and your cover are expendable.

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The End of Oak Street director David Robert Mitchell isn't confirming or denying whether the upcoming sci-fi pic is part of the J.J. Abrams-produced Cloverfield franchise.

"Here’s what I can tell you. I wrote the script before I ever personally talked with J.J. You can make of that whatever you will," Mitchell told SFX Magazine. As for whether the film explains how the neighborhood ended up in whatever dinosaur-infested universe it's currently in, Mitchell says that “there are certainly some answers in there."

"Don't want to over-explain," he continued. "And I think it's a subjective thing as to whether or not someone has enough, but I believe that's the case."

The new movie, written and directed by Mitchell, sees a "mysterious cosmic event" transport Oak Street to an unknown location that's rife with dinosaurs, and the Platt family quickly realizes that the only way they can survive is by sticking together.

Now, there isn't a lot of evidence that points to Oak Street intersecting with, say, Cloverfield Lane in the upcoming film, but the whole different universes and creatures thing and the flash of light in the beginning of the trailer , and the fact that the movie was initially called Flowervale Street (clovers, flowers...), and the whole J.J. Abrams producing thing... I say, at minimum, there's a connection. But only time will tell.

The End of Oak Street arrives in theaters on August 14. For more on what to watch, check out our guide to the rest of this year's biggest movie release dates .