French cloud computing provider Sesterce is investing €450 million ($471.85m) into developing an AI data center in Valence, France.

The data center is set to be located in the Rovaltain business park in Valence Romans Agglo, and will house 40,000 GPUs for the training and deployment of AI.

The data center will use a closed-loop water cooling system which will enable the waste heat to be reused. Works will commence in September 2025 with the data center expected to be launched before the end of 2026.

The size of the facility and capacity in MW were not shared. DCD has contacted Sesterce for more information.

The €450m is the first tranche of investment, eventually expected to reach €1.8bn ($1.89bn) including hardware costs. The data center is part of a wider national plan to develop AI infrastructure in France.

Sesterce has committed to developing 1.5GW of compute power in France, including the deployment of 1.2 million GPUs by 2030.

“This project represents a crucial step in our strategy to develop high-performance computing capabilities in France,” said Anthony Tchakerian, co-founder of Sesterce. “The choice of Valence was a natural one thanks to its dynamic ecosystem and strategic position.”

“The arrival of Sesterce significantly strengthens our position as a territory of excellence for industry and innovation,” added Nicolas Daragon, President of Valence Romans Agglo. “This structuring project reinforces our recent Industrial Territory label and our position among the three most dynamic medium-sized agglomerations in France. It also opens the doors to the establishment of new companies linked to the AI ​​sector.”

In addition to the development of the Valence HPC data center, Sesterce is aiming to add 600MW of capacity across two data centers in Grand Est with 500,000 GPUs by 2028, and 1.2 GW with more than one million GPUs by 2030.

Finally, the company has said it will establish a 250MW supercomputer with 200,000 GPUs in southern France.

Sesterce established its first data center presence in 2018. In October 2024, the company launched an HPC cluster in Paris featuring Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers equipped with Nvidia H200 Tensor Core GPUs, and in December announced a cluster of H100 GPUs housed at a Digital Realty data center in Marseille.

According to the company's website, it currently has 1GW of compute and more than 100,000 GPUs under management.