The national response exists: Project Alpha, funded at 700 million euros in the latest budget. But analysts judge it "far too weak against the scale of foreign technology."¹ The figures are staggering: major tech firms have invested over 700 billion euros in artificial intelligence in recent years.

On the domestic side, signals are encouraging: StartupCo became the first decacorn² with a 1.7 billion euro raise, and LabCo raised over a billion dollars at launch. Real ambitions, but a different order of magnitude.³