Powerstack: Softbank's €45bn bet on France's grid

Does it feel like summer is underway? Hopefully – we're throwing a party!

Sightline and Foley Hoag are hosting a rooftop happy hour in NYC on Monday, June 15 from 6-9pm. Investors, hyperscalers, developers, utilities, and operators at the center of the AI-power buildout. Drinks, light bites, and a top-secret reveal under the New York summer sky. Register here.

This week, France showed just what cheap power and a grid connection are worth. Read more below, and you can also join our event Tuesday, June 23, in London to explore whether Europe can compete in the AI infra buildout at large. Register here.

This is Sightline’s weekly newsletter on the moves and motives shaping the load growth era. Not a client yet?

What happened

Big week out of France (and not just for football ⚽). 

At the Choose France summit in Versailles, President Macron announced €93bn ($108bn) in foreign investment commitments across 71 projects. The headline deal was SoftBank's €45bn ($52bn) commitment to develop 3.1GW of AI-dedicated data centers across northern France by 2031 -- with a long-term option to scale to €75bn ($87bn) and 5GW. That might be par for the course for announcements in the US or China, but it's the largest AI infrastructure bet in Europe to date.

And the power side of the summit was busy too. State-owned energy giant EDF is partnering on the buildout and putting a decommissioned power plant in Bouchain as one of the data center sites. Schneider Electric will come in as a partner on a big industrial cluster at the Port of Dunkirk nearby, and help integrate data center power modules, while enclosures will also be manufactured onsite. And Portuguese utility EDP committed €1.3bn ($1.5bn) to build 1GW of solar, wind, and storage across France over the next four years.

Mark’s take

France's nuclear fleet -- long a liability in EU energy debates, particularly with Germany -- looks like the right bet now.

For two reasons.

The first is that it’s attracting AI infra investment. France draws roughly 70% of its power from nuclear and is regularly Europe’s largest net electricity exporter, with industrial power prices significantly lower than major peers like the UK, Germany, and Italy. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said France’s status as a producer and exporter of energy was "absolutely decisive" for the investment decision. 

The Bouchain site is a decommissioned thermal plant, and that's a feature, not a bug. EDF was able to package this site with its existing grid connection and run a competition for access. What SoftBank bought is cheap electricity and a grid connection that would otherwise mean years in la file d'attente, or the interconnection queue.

Compare that with SoftBank's US plans for its 10GW data center in Ohio. For that one, the company has to build its own gas generation infrastructure at a cost of roughly $33bn. For close to that in France, it can plug into the grid and focus on building the cluster.

In the energy hoarding era, that’s the strategy -- existing grid connections in areas with cheap power. Europe's industrial decline has left scores of dormant industrial sites, each one sitting on a grid connection. Couple those sites with cheap low-carbon power, like in France, or the Nordics, and you get a buildout formula that skips the two hardest steps -- building generation, and getting a grid connection -- and is done at sites where the postcard is already a cooling tower.

We’re exploring Europe's competitiveness in the AI infra buildout on 23 June, in London. We’re bringing together each layer of the AI-power stack with the people actually building it: power, grid, kit, compute, capital, and policy. ​Join us!

The second reason is that the fleet can shape the future of European energy politics. The continent has spent three years scrambling to replace Russian gas, before the Iran War closed the Strait of Hormuz and made European access to LNG even more questionable. The political case for energy self-sufficiency has never been stronger, but until now, it’s been kind of crickets. We even held an event last year where we asked whether Europe can meet this energy moment -- the feeling in the room was that it could, but it’s not. The announcements this week are the first real signs of movement.

Still, Europe's track record on large-scale industrial delivery at speed is uneven, and 3.1GW by 2031 is aggressive. The due diligence phase on Bouchain isn’t done. But the structure is right -- state-backed counterparty, existing site infrastructure, no greenfield permitting fight.

Who this helps

Who should be nervous

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

$365m // Nextpower's acquisition price for BESS developer Prevalon Energy, a JV between Mitsubishi Power Americas and EES. Nextpower (formerly Nextracker) is expanding beyond solar components into the full energy infrastructure stack. The thesis: data centers need capacity, not just power, and short-duration storage can unlock new data center capacity by pairing with existing gas generation. (Plus, the OBBBA cliff is coming up quick.)

100% // Share of South Australia's new LDES tender awarded to lithium-ion. Six projects split 517MW of contracts, doubling down on the tech's clean sweep of New South Wales' 1.2GW tender in February. Competing LDES technologies (liquid CO2, compressed air, liquid air, zinc-halide) are getting lapped on cost, as economies of scale are doing what they do.

750MW // New power generation agreement between Bergen Engines and Crusoe for AI data center infrastructure in the US. The deal includes a 438MW contract and a 310MW LOI, with Bergen supplying natural gas gensets delivered to multiple Crusoe data center locations through 2027. Bergen is a small Norwegian manufacturer, acquired from Rolls-Royce in 2021 for €91m. But it’s another sign that serious AI infrastructure players are going to great lengths to procure gensets.

100MW // Google taps Voltus to source BYOC capacity for data center interconnection. Google contracted Voltus to aggregate 100MW of distributed energy resources over three years -- enrolling residential batteries and C&I flex into a virtual power plant that counts toward Google's interconnection capacity requirements under MISO/PJM's BYOC framework. Lots of details still up in the air, but a sign that third-party DER aggregation is getting to be hyperscaler-grade.

5 // PowerGEM's acquisition count heading into its General Atlantic investment. All five targets were grid-focused -- spanning transmission planning, resource adequacy, market simulation, and IRP consulting -- and GA's BeyondNetZero entry signals the rollup play. There’s a growing market for whoever can own the full grid analytics stack as US system operators drown in interconnection studies, capacity planning complexity, and load growth.

Explore more Signals on Sightline here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Trump authority to fire FERC commissioners at will, expected this summer. If it lands for Trump, the implications for FERC's independence -- and for pending proceedings on interconnection, transmission cost allocation, and large load policy -- are significant.

OPG's Darlington SMR project is under construction, a real milestone for the SMR sector. The first concrete in the ground for a commercial light-water reactor SMR in North America, and we're watching closely, because the GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GVH) BWRX-300 modules are maybe the best shot at a real SMR buildout.

New legislation in PA and NJ to stop data centers from spiking ratepayer electricity bills. Governors in both states set out regulations to establish guardrails on how large loads get cost-allocated - a fight that's been brewing in PJM territory for two years. Watch how the utilities respond, and whether FERC weighs in on preemption.

Northeast AGs file suit to block TotalEnergies offshore wind buyout. As expected, a lawsuit was filed against the Trump administration's $928m settlement with TotalEnergies to walk away from offshore wind leases. 

The latest research, product features, and data drops on the Sightline client platform.

We just published the final three vendor profiles in our power smoothing for data centers focus. ZincFive, Revterra, and Skeleton Technologies have developed tech that can buffer the rapid load swings of AI training clusters. The three span the maturity curve - one’s nearly public, one’s early-stage, and each is fielding strong demand. We applied our vendor scorecard methodology so you can see who leads, and where. Clients can read all three profiles here.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅​ Energy & AI Summer Party // New York City, 15 June, 2026 // Sightline and Foley Hoag are hosting a rooftop happy hour for investors, hyperscalers, developers, utilities, and operators at the center of the AI-power buildout.  Drinks, bites, and a summer evening at the Planeteer rooftop. Request a spot here.

📅 Building & Financing AI in the UK // London, 23 June, 2026 // Held during LCAW, join us for our flagship London event. This year we’ll focus the discussion on the data center buildout (what else?!) and the pathways to the fastest MW. Mark your calendars! Register here.

📅 Trellis Impact 26 // San Francisco, 23-25 June, 2026 // Trellis Impact brings together 3,500+ leaders powering the future of sustainable business, from AI-enabled solutions to emerging technologies reshaping decarbonization, energy, circularity, and beyond. Get practical insights and hard-won examples of the technologies and strategies that are influencing sustainable business transformation. Register and you can get 20% off with our partner code: TI26SCP

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and leverage the tactical intelligence that hundreds of energy and investment decision-makers like Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital and others use to stay ahead in the energy transition.