# Macron and Modi Are Personally Courting Tech CEOs to Win the AI Infrastructure Race > Source: > Published: 2026-07-04 06:52:34+00:00 *Two heads of state are doing the kind of relationship building usually left to sales teams, and it is paying off in tens of billions of dollars of AI infrastructure commitments.* Forget trade envoys and ministerial delegations. French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are working the phones and the guest lists themselves, treating AI data center investment as something won through personal rapport with chief executives rather than policy alone. According to CNBC's reporting on July 4, both leaders have turned their diplomacy into a direct pitch to the people who actually decide where hyperscale capital goes. Macron's biggest win came from Masayoshi Son. The SoftBank founder met the French president in Japan, and that relationship led to a commitment of up to 75 billion euros, or roughly 87 billion dollars, to build AI data centers in France's Hauts-de-France region. CNBC and SoftBank's own announcement put the firm phase at 3.1 gigawatts by 2031, backed by 45 billion euros, with the remaining 30 billion euros contingent on that first phase succeeding. The sites named are Dunkirk, Bosquel and Bouchain, and Schneider Electric is signed on as a strategic partner at Dunkirk, positioning the hub to serve London, Brussels and Amsterdam. It is SoftBank's largest AI infrastructure bet in Europe. That deal did not happen at a negotiating table. It happened because Macron built the relationship first and asked later. The French president ran the same playbook at the G7 summit in Evian on June 15 to 17. He personally invited AI executives to a working lunch alongside world leaders, including President Trump, and got OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis in the room, along with leaders from Mistral, Cohere, Synthesia and Black Forest Labs. Altman's attendance was itself the product of a direct Macron invitation, as CNBC reported back in early June. You do not get four rival AI lab chiefs to the same table by sending a formal letter through a foreign ministry. You get them there because the head of state asked directly. Modi has been running a parallel courtship in India. He met Amazon CEO Andy Jassy directly and welcomed what CNBC described as a record 48 billion dollar investment in India through 2030, with 21 billion dollars of that earmarked specifically for AI and cloud infrastructure, expanding AWS capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad. That builds on a 35 billion dollar pledge Amazon made in December. Combined with everything else Amazon has put into the country since 2010, cumulative investment will now top 88 billion dollars. Amazon was not the only one writing checks. CNBC also reported Microsoft's largest investment in Asia is landing in India to support sovereign AI capabilities, and Google has committed 15 billion dollars to build what would be its largest AI hub outside the United States. Modi then brought Macron to Nice for Bharat Innovates 2026, a three day summit at the Palais des Expositions that opened this month with 120 Indian startups, 15 higher education institutions and more than 500 investors and corporate leaders in the room, covering AI, semiconductors, space, biotech, defense, health and climate technology. The event doubles as the launch of the India-France Year of Innovation. It is hard to think of a clearer signal that both leaders see the relationship itself, not just the deal terms, as the asset worth investing in. Compare this to how China and the Gulf states have approached the same race. Their model runs through sovereign wealth funds and state-directed capital, ADQ and PIF writing checks, Beijing marshaling its own national champions. Macron and Modi are doing something different: treating individual CEOs as people to be personally cultivated, not counterparties to be negotiated with through intermediaries. Frankly, it is a bet that in a market where every government wants the same handful of hyperscalers and chip suppliers, being the leader a CEO actually likes might matter as much as the incentive package on the table. That bet has an expiration date. Data center capital is finite, and every gigawatt SoftBank commits to Hauts-de-France or Amazon commits to Hyderabad is a gigawatt some other capital, some other country, does not get. The leaders who treat this as a relationship business now are the ones setting the terms before the market decides there is no more capital left to court. **Also read:** [Startups Are Racing to Put AI Data Centers in Orbit Before Big Tech Gets There](https://startupfortune.com/startups-are-racing-to-put-ai-data-centers-in-orbit-before-big-tech-gets-there/) • [Micron Breaks Ground on a $9.3 Billion Bet to Crack SK Hynix's Grip on AI Memory](https://startupfortune.com/micron-breaks-ground-on-a-93-billion-bet-to-crack-sk-hynixs-grip-on-ai-memory/) • [SK Hynix is racing to list on Nasdaq just as the AI chip trade it built its fortune on wobbles](https://startupfortune.com/sk-hynix-is-racing-to-list-on-nasdaq-just-as-the-ai-chip-trade-it-built-its-fortune-on-wobbles/)