French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday touted the role of the country’s nuclear energy industry in powering its tech industry while joking about one of President Donald Trump’s favorite slogans.
Macron was speaking in Paris at the AI Action Summit and said that France, which has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power in the world, is well-positioned to power energy-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
“I have a good friend in the other part of the ocean saying ‘drill, baby, drill.’ Here, there is no need to drill. It’s just ‘plug, baby, plug,'” Macron said.
“Electricity is available, you can plug, it’s ready,” he added. “And I can tell you, we will go fast and very fast.”
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France recently announced a more than $100 billion investment to boost AI development in France “in the coming years” with funds coming from foreign and private investors.
Trump campaigned on expanding U.S. oil and gas production and has often said that the industry will be able to “drill, baby, drill” under his leadership.
In his address at the Republican National Convention last summer as the presidential election was ramping up, Trump said that increased U.S. oil and gas drilling would “lead to a large-scale decline in prices.”
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Trump’s calls for expanded fossil fuel production come after former President Joe Biden’s administration implemented new restrictions on energy production on federal lands.
On Inauguration Day, Trump signed executive orders that declared a national energy emergency that aimed to expedite the development of energy infrastructure, as well as an order “unleashing American energy” that revoked executive orders he viewed as impeding energy development.
Last week, the House passed a bill known as the Protecting American Energy Production Act that would block future presidential administrations from enacting bans on oil and gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing (commonly known as “fracking”) without congressional approval.
The bill passed on a 210-188 vote, with 16 Democrats joining all Republicans who voted in support of the legislation. It’s unclear whether the Senate will consider the bill or if it will have enough support to overcome the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshold for the legislative filibuster.
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