🧠 As global chip power consolidates in the U.S. and Asia, the FAMES Pilot Line that just launched in Grenoble and is backed by the EU Chips Act, aims to accelerate lab-to-market transfers and prove Europe can still turn world-class research into industrial semiconductor muscle. Jean-René Lèquepeys, the deputy director and CTO of CEA-Leti, explains the mission and the strategy for getting Europe back in the chip game.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

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Headlines

🗞️ AI Is Becoming France’s New Shopping Assistant. But Trust is still dropping at Checkout. Generative AI is now helping 31% of French online shoppers make purchase decisions, rising to nearly half of Gen Z, according to Fevad. Most use it upstream to compare products, scan reviews, and save time, signalling a structural shift in e-commerce behaviour. But confidence wobbles when money is on the line: trust falls from 47% pre-purchase to just 30% at payment, with concerns around bias, data privacy, and security still lingering. As AI agents edge toward the role of deal hunter and personal shopper, brands may need to rethink SEO and product content for an AI-mediated buying journey. | L’Usine Digitale

🗞️ Doctolib Drops €20M on Clinical AI to become Your Doctor’s Co-Pilot. France’s healthtech heavyweight is launching a dedicated AI lab with a €20m budget, teaming up with heavy hitters like CHU de Nantes, Inserm, and Inria. The goal is to build medically reliable decision-support tools for doctors and a “full health assistant” for patients that is trained on validated local data, not the wild west of the web. With 100 staff now focused on AI and access to 90m patients, Doctolib is betting that trusted, regulated AI, rather than generic chatbots, will win the next phase of digital health. | Maddyness

🗞️ Just days before the César Awards roll out the red carpet, France’s film industry had one more thing to rehearse: a full-throated warning about AI. Nearly 4,000 actors, including some of the country’s biggest names, signed an open letter published in Le Parisien newspaper, warning that artificial intelligence is “plundering” their voices, faces, and livelihoods. The villains of the piece authorized voice cloning, image scraping, and bargain-basement AI deals, including one jaw-dropping offer of €250 to replace two days of filming with a digital replica. The actors call AI a “devouring hydra.” While Brussels fine-tunes its AI Act, French performers say the law still doesn’t clearly protect their likenesses or biometric data, leaving too much room for tech companies to freestyle. Some voice actors have already fired off legal challenges. | Le Parisien, Variety

🗞️ France’s defense heavyweights are joining forces on sovereign AI. Naval Group has taken a stake in Thales’ cortAIx France initiative, forming a power duo aimed at fast-tracking artificial intelligence into mission-critical naval and defense systems. The idea is to develop smarter warships, sharper decision-support tools, automated electronic warfare, and AI-assisted training, all wrapped in algorithmic sovereignty and tight control over sensitive data. CortAIx, launched by Thales in 2024 and already including 800 experts, becomes the industrial engine for this push, with Naval Group’s naval AI specialists joining the ranks. Between collaborative combat systems, real-time data crunching, and logistics optimization, the ambition is to weave AI into the full lifecycle of defense operations, while keeping “humans in control,” as executives are eager to stress. | Ocean News

🗞️ Sumeria’s AI Assistant Gets Conversational. Lydia Solutions is rolling out a natural-language AI assistant inside its Sumeria banking app, letting users query accounts by voice or text and, crucially, execute actions such as preparing transfers or generating virtual cards. Built in-house over two years and orchestrating models from OpenAI, Google, and Mistral, the tool aims to make banking radically more intuitive while keeping data tightly sandboxed. The play is to turn financial UX into a conversation and make “menu diving” officially obsolete. | Maddyness

🗞️ AI-Powered Hack Hits 600 Firewalls. Between January and mid-February, a low-skilled Russian-speaking attacker used off-the-shelf generative AI tools to compromise 600 FortiGate firewalls across 55 countries, without requiring any zero-days. Instead, the campaign scaled classic hygiene failures (weak passwords, exposed management ports) with AI-generated scripts, reconnaissance, and lateral-movement playbooks. The takeaway for France’s tech ecosystem: the threat floor is dropping fast. As AI turns amateurs into industrial-grade attackers, French companies, especially SMEs, face growing pressure to harden basic cyber practices before “good enough” security becomes the easiest target. | L’Usine Digitale

🗞️ Cyber’s “Untouchables” Just Got Stress-Tested by AI. Markets Blinked. Anthropic has unveiled an AI security tool capable of spotting - and fixing - hundreds of software vulnerabilities, reportedly identifying 500 flaws in systems thought to be well protected. The demo rattled Wall Street, wiping billions off the market caps of listed cybersecurity firms as investors digested a brutal possibility: AI may automate parts of cyber defense faster than vendors can monetize them. For France’s cyber champions and deeptech hopefuls, the signal is clear - the value is shifting from tools to speed, automation, and integration. In the AI era, even the people selling the shields may need new armor. | Les Echos

🗞️ Capgemini Steps In as OpenAI Pushes “AI Coworkers” Into the Enterprise. OpenAI is teaming up with consulting heavyweights, including French champion Capgemini, to fast-track the rollout of autonomous “AI coworkers” inside large companies. Through its new Frontier platform, OpenAI aims to have agents execute end-to-end business tasks, while partners like Capgemini handle the messy realities of integration, scaling, and industrial deployment. For the French tech ecosystem, the move underscores where the real battle is shifting: not just building smarter models, but embedding them deep into enterprise workflows at scale. | L’Usine Digitale

ICYMI

🗞️ Europe's AI Reckoning: Caught Between Regulation, Rivalry, and Risk | As 2026 begins, France and the European Union find themselves at the center of a perfect storm, facing diplomatic confrontation with Washington, urgent safety crises, and mounting questions about whether their regulatory approach can survive first contact with geopolitical reality. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ From Tesla to Paris: UMA's Audacious Bet on European Robotics | A new French startup believes Europe—not Silicon Valley—is the best place to build the robots of tomorrow. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Gradium Wants To Make Voice The New Operating System for AI | The Paris startup, spun out of research lab Kyutai, just emerged from stealth with a $60M seed round to become the global foundation layer for real-time voice interactions. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ How HyprView Is Using Photonics And AI To Bring Cancer Diagnostics Into the Light | Thanks to developments in AI, photonics is stepping out of the lab and into the clinic. HyprView uses light to uncover the invisible biology inside tumors - information microscopes miss entirely - opening the door to faster, smarter, and far more predictive cancer diagnostics. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 Europe's €830M Last Stand For Chip Sovereignty May Depend On Grenoble

Europe once controlled 30% of global chip manufacturing. Today it’s closer to 5%. As AI accelerates and geopolitical tensions harden, that collapse has become an economic and strategic liability. In Grenoble, a pilot line at the heart of an €830M program backed by the EU Chips Act is trying to reverse that decline by advancing next-generation semiconductor technology for edge AI and rethinking how Europe turns lab breakthroughs into real manufacturing power.

🗣️ Announcements 🗣️

🚀 €1M AI Challenge for Space Data Innovation | Apply by March 9 | The Île-de-France Region and CNES officially launch a €1 million AI Challenge to accelerate innovation at the intersection of artificial intelligence and space data. Continuing the Region’s AI Challenge series started in 2019, this initiative aims to foster future national champions and strengthen France’s technological and economic sovereignty. Two tracks are open: (1) AI-powered applications leveraging satellite data for use cases such as security, energy, environment, and risk management; and (2) advanced vision-language models for automatic interpretation of high- and very-high-resolution satellite imagery. CNES will provide data, technical expertise, and project oversight. | Apply via the Île-de-France Region platform: Challenge AI for Space

📆 Events 📆

📆 Mistral Worldwide Hackathon - Paris edition | February 28 | Mistral AI is launching its largest hackathon. ​The Mistral Worldwide hackathon is taking place simultaneously in 7 cities: Paris, London / NYC / SF / Tokyo / Singapore, Sydney + online. We're bringing together 1000+ of the best AI engineers for a 2-day overnight hackathon around the world. This hackathon is organized in partnership with Weights & Biases, NVIDIA, AWS, and operated by the Iterate team. The other special awards sponsors include ElevenLabs, Hugging Face, Jump Trading, WhiteCircle, Supercell, and more to come… | Request to join

📆 Air Street Paris AI meetup | March 11 | Air Street Capital is a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies. We write the State of AI Report and Air Street Press. ​Join us for our Air Street Paris AI meetup on Wednesday, 11th of March 2026 at 5 pm. We'll feature speakers on research and applied AI topics, and members of the research, product, engineering, and founder community.| Request to join

📆 AI in Higher Education Summit 2026 | March 17–18 | ESCP Business School | Paris | Artificial intelligence is transforming universities at every level — from classrooms to research labs and administrative offices. The AI in Higher Education Summit 2026 in Paris will bring together academics, innovators, and policy-makers to discuss one central question: How should higher education evolve in an AI-driven world? This international event is the place to exchange ideas, showcase innovations, and shape the roadmap for universities in the age of AI. | Pre-Registration

📆 OpenText Summit Paris 2026 | April 15 | Palais Brongniart | AI is everywhere and full of promise — but without contextualized data, governance, and security, AI fails. Join OpenText Summit Paris 2026 to discover how to unlock the intelligence of your enterprise data and activate AI with confidence. Expect visionary keynotes, French customer success stories, real-world use cases, in-depth small-group sessions, live demos, expert meetings, and peer networking. Explore the latest innovations in content management, cybersecurity, service management, business networks, and more — and learn how to deploy responsible, compliant AI with full control and freedom of choice. | Register

📆 RAISE Summit 2026 | July 8–9, 2026 | Carrousel du Louvre, Paris | Join one of Europe’s most influential AI gatherings bringing together thousands of builders, investors, executives, and innovators to shape the future of artificial intelligence. Learn from global leaders through keynotes, panels, workshops, a hackathon, startup competitions, and high-impact networking — all curated to accelerate AI strategy, investment, and real-world deployment across industries. | Tickets

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