The Second Life of Notre Dame: Microsoft Backs a Digital Resurrection

In 2018, Yves Ubelmann passed on the opportunity to recreate Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in digital form via his company, Iconem, a startup specializing in digitizing cultural sites. At the time, the French founder felt the potential project wasn’t urgent. “Six months after, everything burned,” Ublemann told Observer. Had Ubelmann pursued the project, preservationists would have had access to a 3D model of the Gothic building, and the five-year effort to restore the cathedral’s extensive structural damage may have been streamlined. On Sunday (July 20th), just under eight months since the historic Parisian monument reopened its 862-year-old doors, Microsoft announced it was financing a partnership with Iconen and the French Ministry of Culture to ensure that such a replica is available for future generations.

The initiative will use A.I. and advanced imaging to “preserve permanently in digital form every detail of Notre Dame,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, wrote in a blog post, to create a “digital twin” of Notre Dame that will be donated to the French government. Drawing from techniques developed during a 2024 collaboration between Microsoft and Iconen that created a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica, the project will produce a high-resolution model of the cathedral, which remains France’s most-visited monument. Just as Iconen captured the architectural features of St. Peter’s Basilica in minute detail, cameras, laser scanners and drones will capture images of Notre Dame’s every nook and cranny. Beyond providing archivists with a detailed record of Notre Dame, Ublemann says the digital replica will aid in any future restoration processes. The 3D model will be able to detect any structural changes, such as small cracks, through autonomic monitoring. “I think it will be, in the future, a kind of revolution in the field of restoration,” said Ubelmann.

There’s also an educational element to the project. The digital twin of Notre Dame will eventually be displayed in the Musée Notre Dame de Paris, a museum expected to open in a few years. The museum will provide the public with experiences that are hidden even from in-person visitors. “We will be able to show the public spaces under the roof, the wooden structure—all the details that you cannot see from the ground,” said Ubelmann.

Making A.I. multilingual

Microsoft’s new project was announced in tandem with a broader set of strategies designed to spur the digitization of Europe’s linguistic legacy. Today, A.I. models are primarily trained with online web data, the majority of which is in English, despite the fact that only 5 percent of the world counts English as a first language. This disparity has commercial consequences for international businesses that are unable to utilize A.I. tools like market analysis or content generation to their full potential. Even Iconem, which primarily engages in image recognition technologies instead of using large language models (LLMs), has run into language issues when using A.I. to analyze text. The technology’s emphasis in English “will be one of the biggest problems for A.I.,” said Ublemann.

To that end, Microsoft is embarking on a slew of initiatives to spur the development of more multilingual LLMs. The Big Tech player will place employees in Strasbourg, France, to support inclusive A.I. training efforts. It is also issuing a call for proposals to expand the availability of data in ten European languages. It will collaborate with Common Crawl, a repository of web-crawled data, to fund the annotation of European language data. Ensuring that new technology both benefits and reflects global communities is “one of the defining equity challenges of the A.I. era,” Smith said. “By taking intentional steps now, we can help ensure that A.I. doesn’t erase linguistic and cultural diversity but strengthens it.”