Canada has the largest contingent at VivaTech this year.SIEGFRIED MODOLA/The Globe and Mail
Europe’s largest technology trade show opened with tributes to Canadian innovation – and warnings about global political turmoil and the future of artificial intelligence.
More than 14,000 startups from around the world are participating in VivaTech, which started Wednesday and runs until Saturday at a Paris convention centre.
Organizers select one country each year to highlight, and in 2025, Canada has taken centre stage. As a result, this country has the largest contingent in Paris with 600 delegates, representing industry, academia and the non-profit sector, as well as more than 100 companies displaying their services.
Canada was selected as “country of the year” because of its emergence as a leader in AI, organizers said.
VivaTech has taken on added importance as Canadian companies wrestle with U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and look for new markets to penetrate outside of North America.
“We’re living in a real world, so you have to be dynamic and adaptive,” said Pooya Kazerouni, founder of Vancouver-based Wonderpack, an app that lets women virtually try on clothes while they shop online.
“Obviously, Europe is becoming more and more important. It’s not an ideal world. It’s a real world. You see what’s happening,” Mr. Kazerouni said in front of his booth at the Canada pavilion.
Olivier Blais, whose Montreal consulting company, Moov AI, was recently acquired by French marketing giant Publicis Groupe, said Canadian companies are no longer looking at the U.S. as their first place to expand.
“It’s not the same any more,” he said. “Now we grow our business to a certain level where you can export to Europe. And we’ll work with Europe, because Europe is also very open, especially with Canada.”
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Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, touched on a similar theme as he helped open the trade show.
“If VivaTech took place six months ago, it would have been different. But we’re at a hinge moment in history. Our values are under threat. Our rules-based order is under threat,” he told the audience.
“Global insecurity is reshaping the social and economic paradigm. We also have this political realignment going on at the same moment that AI is reorienting the entire world.”
Mr. Solomon said in an interview later that VivaTech had come at a “perfect moment for Canada” because it fits with the need to broaden the country’s trade ties and scale up Canadian AI technology.
“The Prime Minister has been pretty clear that Canada has to deepen its relationships outside of a total reliance on the United States, and Europe is really important, France, in particular.”
The federal government committed $2.4-billion last year to provide access to computing capabilities and technical infrastructure. Canada has also established three AI institutes and become a world leader in the technology.
Mr. Solomon said part of his job is to reassure Canadians who are fearful of AI and its economic impact. He acknowledged that AI will cause disruption and that some jobs will be lost.
“Technology always comes with disruption, but almost always with opportunity. The history of technology has never really been that humans become irrelevant,” he said.
But, Mr. Solomon added, “that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, deterministic. We have to be aware that we need to up skill our work force.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has touted VivaTech, which is in its ninth year, as an important vehicle to expand Europe’s AI capabilities. In February, he announced that France had attracted €109-billion ($171-billion) in private investment for AI projects. The government has also drawn up a list of 65 potential sites for data centres.
During a tour of the trade show on Wednesday, which included a stop at the Canadian pavilion, Mr. Macron said he wanted to “build a computing power capacity installed in Europe with European solutions.”
Mistral AI founder and CEO Arthur Mensch, left, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and French President Emmanuel Macron speak during a round table discussion at VivaTech.SARAH MEYSSONNIER/AFP/Getty Images
Nvidia Corp. chief executive Jensen Huang in a presentation earlier on Wednesday revealed a partnership with French startup Mistral AI to build new data centres in France. It was among a series of his announcements in recent weeks aimed at ramping up AI infrastructure in Europe, which has lagged behind the U.S. and China.
“Europe has now awakened to the importance of these AI factories,” he said.
Mistral will use 18,000 of Nvidia’s advanced Grace Blackwell chips to build a data centre in Essonne, France. It plans to roll out further centres across Europe.
“We’re going to build an AI cloud together,” Mr. Huang said.
On Thursday, Mr. Solomon is set to join officials from Montreal-based Hypertec for an announcement at VivaTech involving a strategic initiative in Europe to develop AI data centres. The company is expected to announce investments in data centres in Europe and Canada.