Countries are scrambling not to fall behind in AI — and French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are leading a personal charm offensives to court tech CEOs.
The pair have ramped up moves to court leaders of the world’s biggest tech companies this year, as they look to secure investment and major AI infrastructure projects.
They stand out among the countries scrambling to develop the data centers and ecosystems needed to power the tech, for their use of personal relationships.
The French President hosted AI bosses at the G7 summit in June, and personally convinced SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son to invest tens of billions of dollars into AI data centers in the country.
Modi met with Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy last Thursday, and welcomed the U.S. tech giant’s “record $48 billion investment” in the country, of which $21 billion will be for AI and cloud infrastructure.
Modi last year met Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan, with all of them committing to help develop India’s AI ecosystem.
Macron hosts AI leaders
In May, SoftBank announced plans to build 3.1 GW of AI data centers in France by 2031, as part of a 75-billion-euro program to roll out 5 GW of AI data center capacity.
Macron requested a meeting with SoftBank’s Son to persuade him to commit to the project two months earlier, and the two exchanged texts as they hashed out the details, Son told CNBC in an interview.
Macron touted France’s power capacity — the country gets a large amount of its electricity from nuclear — and committed to securing the SoftBank projects 3GW instead of 2GW, the number the French premier first suggested, he added.
“His team, the government team is very supportive,” Son said. “His team and our team work in collaboration very well.”
Around the same time, Macron approached tech bosses to join a working lunch with world leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump, at the G7 conference in June, which France was hosting.
CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis all took part.
Other tech chiefs including France-based Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Canada’s Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Italian company Domyn’s Uljan Sharka, U.K. AI scaleup Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli and German-based Black Forest Labs’ Robin Rombach were also there.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (C) takes a group photo with AI company leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (2nd R), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (R), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (2nd L), and Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang (L), at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026.
Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
India
Modi too hosted top U.S. tech leaders earlier this year at the Global AI summit in India, leading to commitments of hundreds of billions of dollars into Indian AI efforts.
“India does not see fear in AI. India sees fortune in AI. India sees the future in AI,” Modi said in his opening remarks at the summit in February, urging global tech leaders to “Design and Develop in India” to deliver to the world.
Securing investments and partnerships for developing AI has been a top priority for Modi. India does not yet produce cutting-edge chips domestically, nor does it have a frontier-scale foundation model on a par with leading U.S. or Chinese models, so it is widely seen as a laggard in the AI race.
The prime minister has been encouraging global tech firms to invest in developing AI infrastructure and chips in the country.
Months before the summit, India secured Microsoft’s largest investment in Asia to help build the sovereign capabilities needed for India’s AI-first future, while Google announced an investment of $15 billion in India to build the firm’s largest AI hub in the world outside of the U.S. To encourage hyperscalers to build AI data centers in India, Modi’s government has offered long‑term tax breaks to them.
It is also encouraging local companies to develop semiconductors in the country.
During Modi’s visit to the Netherlands in May, Dutch firm ASML said it would supply advanced lithography tools and solutions for the 300mm semiconductor fab being set up by Indian firm Tata Electronics. Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan, who met Modi last December, also signed up as a prospective buyer for chips made by Tata Electronics.
India relies heavily on foreign AI models and computing hardware, which makes its AI ambitions vulnerable to export control directives of other countries.
The recent global AI stocks rally has completely skipped India due to the lack of any large-scale AI play, making Modi’s urgency to attract capital and technology evident and all the more important.
