Swedish startup evroc has unveiled plans to build a hyperscale data centre in France, just as the country’s AI Action Summit gets underway.
The company hopes to become the European alternative to American cloud services such Amazon Web Services (AWS). In summer of 2023, evroc announced it was planning to raise €3bn within two years to develop and operate two hyperscale data centres in Europe.
The first is already being built nearby Stockholm’s international airport, and now evroc exclusively told Sifted the second would be constructed in Mougins, just over 500 miles south of Paris. The French town is a ten minute drive from the tech park Sophia Antipolis, where evroc already has a development office.
The 96-megawatt facility will house around 50k GPUs and is set to be up and running later this year. Reaching full capacity will require an estimated €4bn investment, according to the company.
Plans to build a European cloud service for those who cannot use American cloud services for security reasons, as well as increasing Europe’s ability for AI development, gathered pace as cloud computing has become a key objective for tech sovereignty at the EU level.
Key for EU tech sovereignty
The EU has pledged to invest €2bn via the European Data Strategy in a European High Impact Project that will provide energy-efficient and trustworthy cloud infrastructure and related services.
“We see France as a central hub for AI research and innovation,” says Mattias Åström, the founder and CEO behind EQT-backed evroc, in a statement.
Åström is not the only one who sees potential in France. Late last week, leading up to the AI Action Summit in Paris starting today, the UAE and France jointly announced that the UAE is investing billions of euros to build a massive AI data centre in France.
With the French government’s new set of objectives as part of its AI strategy, up to 35 sites have been identified across France as potential spots for future data centres, according to the French government.
Åström has had his eyes on France for some time and met with French President Emmanuel Macron during a presidential visit to Stockholm one year ago.
The Swedish startup, headquartered in Stockholm with a development office in London as well as Sophia Antipolis, is planning to secure two additional 100+ megawatt sites in France during 2025, which the company believes are key steps to establishing a European hyperscale cloud.
Data centres currently consume about 3% of the global electricity supply, and account for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions — a similar amount to air travel.
By building hyperscale cloud data centres — with about 100k servers each — one can limit the amount of energy used to run them. Once several of the centres are up and running, non-urgent data, like some databases, can be distributed between centres based on where renewable energy is most readily available and affordable.
“When the sun is shining in Spain, then we move the data there, and when the wind is blowing in the Netherlands then we move it there. At other times we move it to the north of Sweden where we have an abundance of hydroelectric power,” Åström previously told Sifted.
In 2023, evroc’s said it wanted to build eight hyperscale data centres and employ 3,000 people by 2028. That goal has now increased to ten centres and employ 10k people in Europe by 2030.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/evroc-hyperscale-ai-data-centre-in-france-news/
