Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Emmanuel Macron, France's president at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday made a pitch for his country to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world, in a bid to position itself as a critical tech hub in Europe.
The comments come as European tech companies and countries are reassessing their reliance on foreign technology firms for critical technology and infrastructure.
Chipmaking in particular arose as a topic after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was doing a panel talk alongside Macron and Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, said on Wednesday that the company's first graphics processing unit (GPU) was manufactured in France by SGS Thomson Microelectronics, now known as STMicroelectronics.
Yet STMicroelectronics is currently not at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing. Most of the chips it makes are for industries like the automotive one, which don't required the most cutting-edge semiconductors.
Macron nevertheless laid his ambition out for France to be able to manufacture semiconductors in the range of 2 nanometers to 10 nanometers.
"If we want to consolidate our industry, we have now to get more and more of the chips at the right scale," Macron said on Wednesday.
The smaller the nanometer number, the more transistors that can be fit into a chip, leading to a more powerful semiconductor. Apple's latest iPhone chips, for instance, are based on 3 nanometer technology.
Very few companies are able to manufacture chips at this level and on a large scale, with Samsung and Nvidia provider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) leading the pack.
If France wants to produce these cutting-edge chips, it will likely need TSMC or Samsung to build a factory locally — something that has been happening in the U.S. TSMC has now committed billions of dollars to build more factories Stateside.
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