Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman closed the first session of the Saudi-French Strategic Partnership Council at the Elysee Palace on Monday with President Emmanuel Macron, and the two governments emerged with 21 agreements and memoranda, an export-credit framework of up to $5 billion, and one commitment that inverts the usual geometry of the relationship: Qiddiya Investment Company, the Public Investment Fund developer building the entertainment city west of Riyadh, will anchor a 6 billion euro ($7 billion) leisure destination at Cergy-Pontoise, north of Paris. France has built in the Kingdom for decades. The Kingdom is now building in France.
The council session and the investment roundtable beside it produced a long register. The two states signed a defense letter of intent covering emerging technologies, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and military training exchanges; a framework on AI and quantum technologies; a healthcare cooperation agreement; and an extension of the AlUla development partnership to 2035. Investment Minister Fahad Al-Saif and French Economy Minister Roland Lescure signed a memorandum on investment promotion. On the corporate track, Saudi Aramco signed agreements worth about $3.7 billion with SLB and Vallourec for drilling materials and steel pipe. CMA CGM and Red Sea Gateway Terminal agreed a 434 million euro expansion of Terminal 4 at Jeddah Islamic Port, adding 2.6 million containers of annual capacity. Alstom took a 500 million euro order for additional Riyadh Metro trainsets and an assembly-plant agreement for Line 7. Orano and Maaden signed on nuclear fuel technology, HUMAIN and Mistral AI on models and computing, and SAUR and Nesma & Partners formed a $150 million wastewater venture. Saudia arranged Airbus aircraft financing with Credit Agricole, supported by Saudi EXIM.
The quietest item on the list will do the most work. Bpifrance Assurance Export, the French state’s export-credit arm, agreed a framework of up to $5 billion to finance French company contracts on Kingdom projects, from Riyadh Metro rolling stock to hotel construction at AlUla, alongside $3 billion in financing support for electricity-grid works. Export credit is how a mid-sized economy keeps its contractors competitive on another country’s megaprojects: Paris absorbs part of the financing risk, French bids price lower, and Saudi project owners raise funding that does not draw on domestic banks already running loan-to-deposit ratios above 100 percent. It follows Maaden’s $1 billion international syndication by a week, and the logic is the same: put foreign balance sheets to work on the buildout and leave domestic credit capacity for the private sector.
The more novel business ran in the other direction. French direct investment stock in the Kingdom stood near $17 billion in 2024, the fourth-largest source of foreign investment, spread across 651 licenses in 18 sectors. Saudi capital in France is newer and moving faster. The Public Investment Fund has placed about 7.4 billion euros there since 2017, supporting an estimated 29,000 jobs, and agreed a new cooperation framework with Bpifrance of roughly 8.6 billion euros. Qiddiya’s Cergy-Pontoise destination, with three parks, hotels, dining and housing and a projected 22,000 jobs, is the first time a Saudi giga-project developer has taken its core product abroad. The Ministry of Culture chose the same week to announce a Saudi cultural center in Paris. And two days before the council met, the Esports World Cup, built by a PIF-backed foundation, closed its first season held abroad in a Paris arena with both leaders in the hall. Entertainment was designed as a diversification sector for the domestic economy. It is beginning to behave like an export industry.
The technology agreements pair two governments with the same concern. HUMAIN, the PIF’s artificial intelligence company, will work with Mistral AI, Europe’s most prominent independent model developer, on next-generation models and computing capacity. Neither Riyadh nor Paris wants its AI stack to route exclusively through the American hyperscalers, and the pairing gives HUMAIN a European model partner while giving Mistral access to Gulf compute and capital. Orano’s memorandum with Maaden runs the same logic through the fuel cycle: France operates one of the world’s largest civilian nuclear programs and knows the chain from uranium to fuel assembly, and the Kingdom has a stated civilian nuclear ambition and a mining champion now expected to help supply it.
The joint statement restated positions the Kingdom has already put on record on regional files, including maritime navigation and de-escalation. The rest of the week’s output is institutional. The relationship now has standing machinery, and standing machinery is judged by what it processes between meetings of the principals.
The register will be tested in sequence. The first drawdowns under the Bpifrance framework will show which projects Paris is actually financing. Cergy-Pontoise now enters French planning procedure, where a 6 billion euro commitment meets local permitting and a 22,000-job projection acquires dates. The Mistral partnership will be measurable in deployed compute. And the council’s second session, whenever it convenes in Riyadh, will show whether the machinery built this week runs at the cadence both governments say they want.