How The iliad Group Plans to Invest €3 billion in AI
The iliad Group is investing billions into AI to become a market leader across Europe, allocating €3 billion (US$3.09bn) into AI infrastructure, research and application layers.
The company announced its intentions ahead of the AI Action Summit that started on Monday in Paris. Funding pledged will go to support data centres and computing power and involves notable partnerships with AI leaders like Mistral.
Created in the 1990s by Xavier Niel, the iliad Group is 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.”
Data Centre Magazine breaks down some of the key proposals from The iliad Group via its subsidiary companies.
OpCore: Supporting hyperscale development
OpCore is one of the leading independent data centre platforms in Europe and operates iliad Group’s 13 data centres. The subsidiary will be investing €2.5 billion (US$2.57bn) to bolster its position as a hyperscale data centre leader, as it commits further to support AI compute.
In order to achieve this, the Group has forged a partnership with InfraVia, a major independent private equity firm in Europe. 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.
Scaleway: Making AI compute available
Another Group subsidiary, Scaleway, one of the largest AI compute capacities available commercially in Europe, has also received significant investment. Through this, the Group has almost 5,000 top-tier GPUs available to offer to companies for training and use. Some businesses that harness Scaleway are Mistral AI, H and Photoroom, according to the company.
Likewise, 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: Democratising AI with Mistral AI
As part of this investment, Free and Mistral AI have announced a significant partnership that is unprecedented in France.
By teaming up with Mistral AI, Free has become the country’s first telco to offer all of its mobile subscribers an AI assistant with an exclusive 12 months free-of-charge offer for le Chat Pro – the new premium version of the AI assistant developed by Mistral AI.
This development means that Free’s 15.5 million subscribers will be able to use a state-of-the-art AI tool at no extra cost that was developed by a French champion and European leader in AI.
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 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.
Kyutai’s latest development is to launch Hibiki, a ground-breaking voice technology for simultaneous translation. Hibiki – which means echo in Japanese – translates in real time while preserving the speaker’s voice and optimally adapting its pace to the semantic content of the source speech.
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 shares in its announcement. “Thanks to its simple inference process, it is compatible with real-time on-device usage.
“This launch marks a new milestone in voice technologies by opening up extraordinary opportunities for communication and accessibility.”
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