Busy week for the French telecoms group as it is also talking to Italian government about a possible tie up with Telecom Italia
The Iliad Group has announced plans to invest €3 billion in AI Ahead of the AI Action Summit which opens today in Paris. The plans are not new – they were revealed in December when Iliad said it was partnering private equity firm InfraVia to turn OpCore into a major European hyperscale data centre platform. OpCore has a 20-year history of operating data centres to meet the needs of the Iliad Group, hyperscalers, techcos and large corporations. It has data centres in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Poland.
Ignoring the fact that every good summit needs a good local announcement, the €3 bn figure announced on Friday is up from €2.5+ billion mentioned by CEO Thomas Reynaud (above) in December and comprises a couple more initiatives. The Group has allocated a total of €3 billion to invest in AI-dedicated infrastructure (from data centres and computing power), research and application layers.
OpCore – which operates the Group’s 13 data centres – will be investing €2.5 billion in AI-capable hyperscale data centres. Thanks to the partnership with InfraVia, OpCore will have several hundred megawatts of capacity in the short-term and the long-term aim is to build several gigawatts of capacity across Europe.
Through Scaleway – its B2B cloud provider subsidiary – the Group claims it has also invested in the largest AI compute capacity available in the commercial market in Europe. This means that almost 5,000 “top-tier” GPUs are offered to companies for them to train and use their models. Iliad points to Mistral AI, H and Photoroom as Scaleway users.
“Thanks to Scaleway, the best open-source models – Llama (Meta), Moshi (Kyutai), and now DeepSeek – are available for all companies in a sovereign and secure cloud environment,” the company said in a statement.
le Chat Pro
Iliad also announced it has teamed up with Mistral AI to 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 means that Free’s 15.5 million subscribers will be able to use it at no extra cost.
Le Chat Pro will be offered for 12 months free of charge then €17.99/month incl. VAT (€14.99/month excl. VAT), on a no-contract basis; valid only for Free mobile subscribers (on a €2, Série Free or 5G Free Mobile plan), provided they have no current Mistral AI paying subscription, and provided they sign up for the le Chat Pro service via their Subscriber Area before 10 August 2025. The service available on compatible devices only (the app can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play Store) and on the Mistral AI website.
Kyutai an independent lab dedicated to AI
Iliad’s nonprofit open-science AI research lab Kyutai has introduced Hibiki, an innovative simultaneous translation tool. Hibiki translates speech from French to English in real time, preserving the speaker’s voice and adjusting its pace to match the original speech’s semantic content. It provides both oral and written translations, with Iliad claiming it surpasses current standards in translation quality, voice fidelity, and naturalness. Designed for efficiency, Hibiki supports real-time, on-device usage.
This launch follows Kyutai’s July 2024 release of Moshi, an open-source AI model renowned for its exceptional voice capabilities. Kyutai was established in late 2023 and co-founded by the Iliad Group with an initial investment of €100 million.
“For several years now at the Iliad Group we’ve believed in the power of artificial intelligence, which is why we decided to devote the necessary resources to it,” said Reynaud. “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. 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.”
Italian job
According to Reuters Iliad has been in touch with the Italian government around a potential deal with Telecom Italia, according to sources. They are not the only ones either as CVC Capital Partners is also seeking some for of deal and has been in touch. Reynaud informed Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti and other top government officials this week that the telecoms group is studying a tie-up between its Italian business and TIM.
CVC has its eyes on Vivendi’s 24% stake in the Italian incumbent. The government has ‘golden powers’ to vet any stake purchase bigger than 3%.