Paris Announces Twelve New AI Datacentres In Response To Riots, Citing Need To Give People Something To Do

The French government announced on Monday that its answer to several weeks of street unrest will be twelve new artificial intelligence datacentres, on the grounds that the people protesting would then have something to do.

The announcement follows a nine-day ministerial offsite. It is understood the policy was drafted at Lake Tahoe, which aides chose because "it is where these decisions are traditionally made". No minutes were taken. One attendee, a person in a gilet, said the room reached consensus "somewhere around the second fondue".

Aurélien Fasquelle-Morin, Deputy Delegate-General for Digital Sovereignty, Public Calm and Adjacent Opportunities, said the government had studied the problem closely. "The problem is that there is not enough AI," he said. "Once there is enough AI, we will ask the problem to summarise itself, and then it will be gone." Asked how the datacentres would help with rents, he put his fingers in his ears and said "la la la" for forty-one seconds. His office later called this "a consultation".

The plan has been warmly received on Sand Hill Road. "Every problem is just a datacentre that hasn't been built yet," said Hollis Brandt-Okafor, Managing Partner at Brandt Okafor Ventures, from behind a standing desk he was sitting at. "Civil unrest, traffic, pensions. We have a thesis on all three. The thesis is: more compute."

At Grindhouse Coffee on University Avenue, barista Priyanka Adeyemi-Lowe said three founders had come in before nine calling France "a massive unlock". "None of them could find it on the map by the door," she said. "To be fair, it's a map of Palo Alto."

Meanwhile, a jobs portal in Lyon called Travail.ai reports a sharp rise in applications to Riot Platforms, the Texas bitcoin miner, from people left out of work by the unrest. They say their experience suits the role. One cover letter seen by the Sentinel listed "long nights, loud environments, and standing outside a large building waiting for something to happen". Riot Platforms did not respond to the Sentinel's inquiries. It is understood these were sent by fax.

"I saw the name and thought, finally, a company hiring for my CV," said Théo, 24, an applicant from outside Marseille. "Then I read the job is mostly watching computers make money that isn't really there. I've done that too. It was called an internship at a bank."

Dr Lenore Vasquez-Hart, Director of the Institute for Applied Hype Studies, surveyed a cohort of fourteen ministers. She found that 92.86 per cent believe AI can fix "basically everything, give or take". The fourteenth was at lunch. Each datacentre is projected to employ 31 people, 22 of them security guards, and to draw about as much electricity as Lyon on a cold Thursday.

Markets took the news calmly. French bonds were patchy overnight, with a chance of showers in the long end. The word "AI" rose 4.1 points over Paris and was expected to settle over the Loire by evening. Shares in companies with "Calm" in their name traded sideways and then had a lie-down.

Late on Monday, the ministry confirmed that the first datacentre will be run entirely by AI, so that the protesters are free to do something else.