The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, announced on Sunday April 28 that he had sent the struggling French IT giant, Atos, “a letter of intent with a view to acquiring all of Atos’ sovereign activities,” in order to prevent strategic activities for France from “passing into the hands of foreign actors”, he added on LCI. Atos, in the midst of financial turmoil, notably owns supercomputers used for nuclear deterrence and contracts with the French army.
The activities concerned by the letter of intent cover in particular these supercomputers, servers participating in artificial intelligence and quantum computing or even cybersecurity products, we learned from the minister’s office.
This scope generates an annual turnover of around 900 million euros, out of a total of nearly 11 billion euros for the entire Atos group, and brings together 4,000 employees, mainly based in France, said the same source.
In this highly political matter, the State has already committed to lending 50 million euros to the company to help it stabilize its financial situation and has acquired a “preferential action” which allows it to veto in certain operations with Bull, a subsidiary of Atos which builds its supercomputers.
The minister hopes to rally other French actors for this operation
For this letter of intent, an action which is not binding, it is the State Participation Agency which is leading the operation under the authority of Bruno Le Maire, he underlined.
The minister, however, said he hoped “that the State is not alone” and hopes to rally other French actors for this operation. Without giving their names, he explained that they could be companies operating in the fields of defense or aeronautics. According to his office, “discussions” have been underway “for several weeks” with a certain number of industrialists “which would make sense in terms of the development of these activities”.
