<p class="title">France has enlisted tech companies Dassault Systemes and OVH to come up with plans to break the dominance of US companies in cloud computing, its finance minister said on Thursday.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Paris is eager to build up a capacity to store sensitive data in France amid concerns the US government can obtain data kept on the servers of US companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"We have asked Dassault Systemes and OVH as well to work on this and we will have the first results in December 2019," Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told a conference at French online ad company Criteo.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Based on these results, we want to build a trustworthy cloud to store our companies' most sensitive data," he said, adding the project would be done at the Franco-German level at first and possibly at the European level later.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Dassault Systemes is a French software company and OVH is a privately held French cloud computing company.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Paris is concerned a 2018 US law called the Cloud Act lets any US agency access European corporate data that is stored on the data centres of US companies without telling them.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"It's totally unacceptable," Le Maire said, adding a solution needed to be found urgently between Washington and the European Union.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Le Maire said France would invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) by 2020 in artificial intelligence (AI), with 600 million in research and 800 million in seed-money and funds for bringing AI projects to market.</p>.<p class="bodytext">The money will come from an innovation fund financed by the sell off of state assets, starting with the sale of a stake in French lottery monopoly la Francaise des Jeux "in the coming weeks", he said.</p>.<p class="bodytext">($1 = 0.9128 euros)</p>
<p class="title">France has enlisted tech companies Dassault Systemes and OVH to come up with plans to break the dominance of US companies in cloud computing, its finance minister said on Thursday.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Paris is eager to build up a capacity to store sensitive data in France amid concerns the US government can obtain data kept on the servers of US companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"We have asked Dassault Systemes and OVH as well to work on this and we will have the first results in December 2019," Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told a conference at French online ad company Criteo.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Based on these results, we want to build a trustworthy cloud to store our companies' most sensitive data," he said, adding the project would be done at the Franco-German level at first and possibly at the European level later.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Dassault Systemes is a French software company and OVH is a privately held French cloud computing company.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Paris is concerned a 2018 US law called the Cloud Act lets any US agency access European corporate data that is stored on the data centres of US companies without telling them.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"It's totally unacceptable," Le Maire said, adding a solution needed to be found urgently between Washington and the European Union.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Le Maire said France would invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) by 2020 in artificial intelligence (AI), with 600 million in research and 800 million in seed-money and funds for bringing AI projects to market.</p>.<p class="bodytext">The money will come from an innovation fund financed by the sell off of state assets, starting with the sale of a stake in French lottery monopoly la Francaise des Jeux "in the coming weeks", he said.</p>.<p class="bodytext">($1 = 0.9128 euros)</p>