The Aide aux Projets Structurants (Strategic Project Support) is France 2030’s highest-stakes funding instrument — the mechanism reserved for transformative industrial investments that are too large, too strategically sensitive, and too complex for conventional competitive calls. These are not competitions. They are negotiations. And the sums involved — individual grants ranging from €100 million to over €1 billion — represent the largest concentrations of public industrial investment in France since the state privatizations of the 1990s.

What Makes a Project “Structurant”

The term structurant — structuring — is precise in the French policy context. A structuring project is one that fundamentally reshapes the industrial landscape of its sector, not merely adds capacity. The criteria are both quantitative and qualitative:

Minimum Investment Scale: The project’s total investment must exceed €500 million to qualify for Aide aux Projets Structurants consideration. Most qualifying projects range from €500 million to €7+ billion. This threshold reflects the strategic calculus that smaller investments, however valuable, can be handled through competitive grant programs without the bilateral negotiation process that structural projects require.

Transformative Sector Impact: The project must represent a step-change in France’s position in a strategic sector — creating a new industrial capability that did not previously exist, or scaling an existing capability to a level that achieves European or global competitive significance. A third battery gigafactory in a region with two existing plants is not structurant. The first gigafactory in France, or the first hydrogen DRI steel plant, is.

Employment and Territory: Structural projects must create or sustain a minimum of several hundred direct jobs in France. Employment quality matters — the evaluation considers the skill level, wage level, and geographic location of jobs created, with preference for regions with industrial restructuring challenges.

Sovereignty Dimension: Projects that build French sovereign capability in sectors identified in France 2030’s 10 strategic objectives receive priority. This criterion explicitly values strategic autonomy: a project that produces something France currently imports from strategic competitors — advanced chips, battery cells, green hydrogen, mRNA vaccines — is inherently more valuable than equivalent economic activity in non-strategic sectors.

The Negotiation Process

Unlike I-Démo or I-Nov, which are open competitive calls with transparent evaluation rubrics, Aide aux Projets Structurants support is awarded through a bilateral negotiation between the company, the relevant ministries (typically Economy and Finance + Industry), and SGPI. This process is:

Stage 1 — Initial Contact and Pre-Screening: Companies or their advisors approach either the Minister of Industry’s office or SGPI directly. There is no public application portal. A preliminary discussion establishes whether the project meets the threshold criteria and whether the state has interest in supporting it.

Stage 2 — Dossier Preparation: Qualifying projects prepare a comprehensive investment dossier (typically 200 to 500 pages) covering technical specifications, financial model, employment commitments, supply chain integration, environmental impact, competitive analysis, and the specific public support being requested. The dossier is reviewed by SGPI technical staff and independent experts.

Stage 3 — Interministerial Working Group: For projects above €500 million in public support, an interministerial working group convenes to assess the project from multiple angles — economic impact, European state aid compliance, sectoral strategy alignment, and fiscal sustainability. This group includes representatives from Economy, Industry, Environment, Finance, and relevant sector regulators.

Stage 4 — European Notification: Under EU State Aid rules, grants above €10 million to a single beneficiary generally require prior notification to the European Commission. For projects at the scale of Aide aux Projets Structurants, European pre-clearance is an explicit condition of French support. The process adds 6 to 18 months to the timeline but provides legal certainty.

Stage 5 — Convention Signature: The funding agreement specifies amounts, conditions, milestone schedules, intellectual property commitments, employment guarantees, and clawback provisions for failure to deliver committed outcomes.

Timeline from first contact to contract signature: Typically 18 to 36 months for projects in this size range.

Landmark Structural Project Awards

STMicroelectronics - GlobalFoundries Crolles Expansion

The largest Aide aux Projets Structurants award in France 2030: approximately €2.9 billion in combined French and European public support for the joint 300mm semiconductor fab expansion at Crolles.

Total project investment: €7.5 billion over 2023-2027 French state support: approximately €1.6 billion (grants + tax credits) European Chips Act co-funding: approximately €900 million Regional (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes): approximately €400 million Employment commitment: 1,000 new engineers and technicians at full run rate

Rationale: This project is the anchor of France’s semiconductor sovereignty strategy. Crolles produces FD-SOI process technology where France holds a genuine global competitive advantage — not competing head-to-head with TSMC and Samsung in leading-edge logic, but occupying a defensible niche in RF semiconductors, automotive chips, and IoT devices where the French FD-SOI technology has performance characteristics (low power consumption, analog integration) that justify European premium.

ArcelorMittal Dunkirk — Hydrogen DRI Steel

Total investment: €1.7 billion France 2030 direct grant: approximately €280 million Guaranteed loan from Bpifrance: approximately €400 million Additional EU hydrogen IPCEI support: under negotiation Employment: 2,000 direct jobs maintained, 500 new construction jobs

This is France 2030’s most important industrial decarbonization project. The Dunkirk site — ArcelorMittal’s largest European production facility — will transition from coal-fired blast furnace steelmaking to hydrogen-based Direct Reduced Iron. If fully executed, the facility will eliminate approximately 6 million tonnes of CO2 per year and establish France as the home of Europe’s first low-carbon steel production at commercial scale.

ACC Billy-Berclau/Douvrin — Battery Gigafactory Phase 1

This award — €810 million through IPCEI Batteries — is technically an IPCEI award rather than a pure Aide aux Projets Structurants, but it exemplifies the structural project philosophy. ACC’s gigafactory is structuring in the precise sense: it created European battery manufacturing capability that previously did not exist.

Total project investment (Phase 1): approximately €2 billion European IPCEI Batteries: €810 million Private co-investment (Stellantis, TotalEnergies, Mercedes): approximately €1.2 billion Employment Phase 1: 2,000 workers

Verkor Dunkirk Gigafactory

Total investment: approximately €2.1 billion (Phase 1) France 2030 support: approximately €850 million (grants, guaranteed loans, Bpifrance equity) Employment: 1,200 at full run rate Phase 1

Verkor’s Dunkirk gigafactory was not the only option available to the startup. Spain (Sagunto, near Valencia) and Belgium (Wallonia region) competed intensively for the project. France’s winning argument was the comprehensive package: France 2030 grants, Bpifrance equity investment, guaranteed loans, and Renault as an anchor customer with a long-term supply agreement. The total state support package was decisive in the location choice.

Sanofi Vitry-sur-Seine — mRNA Manufacturing Platform

Total investment: approximately €1.2 billion France 2030 health strategy support: approximately €400 million Employment commitment: 300 new highly-skilled manufacturing positions

Sanofi’s commitment to build a dedicated mRNA drug substance manufacturing platform at Vitry — its historic French R&D site — was secured through direct ministerial engagement and a combination of France 2030 grants and R&D tax credit pre-validation. The platform is designed to produce not only mRNA vaccines but mRNA-based therapeutics, including cancer vaccines and rare disease treatments.

The Investment Multiplier in Structural Projects

At the structural project scale, the leverage ratios are the most powerful in France 2030’s toolkit. Analysis of the four largest structural projects shows:

Each public euro committed to structural projects has attracted approximately €1.5 of additional private investment — a leverage ratio that makes structural project support the most capital-efficient element of France 2030, despite the complexity of the negotiation process.

Governance: Transparency and Accountability

Aide aux Projets Structurants support requires ex-post reporting to the National Assembly and the Cour des Comptes. Beneficiary companies must submit annual progress reports against employment and investment milestones. Clawback provisions allow the state to recover grants proportionally if commitments are not met.

The 2023 Cour des Comptes review of structural project governance identified one concern: the negotiated nature of awards creates risk of political influence on project selection. The SGPI’s response — establishing independent economic evaluation as a necessary condition before political approval — has improved process discipline without eliminating the discretionary element that is inherent to strategic project selection.