OpCore, the data center company owned by French telco Iliad and InfraVia, is to build a new facility on land owned by utility EDF.

As reported by DCMag.fr, James Chéron, vice president of the Région Ile de France government, announced the news on LinkedIn last week.

“Opcore has been selected to build and operate the future data center of Montereau Vallée de la Seine, on the industrial wasteland created by the deconstruction of the Montereau Power Plant, in the municipalities of La Grande-Paroisse and Vernou-la-Celle-sur-Seine,” he said this week.

The 20-hectare project had an authorized grid connection potentially totaling 700MW – though details of any planned data center(s) haven’t been shared. The companies are yet to comment on the news.

The site – some 75km (46.6 miles) southeast of Paris – is one of four potential data center developments on EDF land at current or former power plant facilities.

In February, the French energy utility announced it was requesting expressions of interest for digital companies wishing to build data centers on EDF-owned land in France. The company has earmarked four sites across the country, totaling up to 2GW of capacity, with fast-tracked grid connections.

EDF is also offering up potential developments at La Maxe and Richemont in Moselle. Details on the fourth site haven’t been shared. Efforts are underway to identify other suitable land spaces, with the aim of selecting two additional sites by 2026, for a total of six sites.

The utility is the world’s largest nuclear power producer – with its nuclear output topping 360TWh in 2024. In October, EDF launched Project Giga to meet the growing energy demand from artificial intelligence data centers. The project plans to leverage EDF’s land and grid connections to supply low-carbon power to major hyperscalers.

OpCore, meanwhile, was formed in 2023 after French telco Iliad separated its data center business from its Scaleway cloud unit. The company has six data centers across Paris, one each in Lyon and Marseille, and seven in Poland. The portfolio totals around 131MW, including in-development projects.

Investment firm InfraVia acquired a 50 percent stake in the firm last year, fuelling plans to scale OpCore to more than 130MW through the development of a 100MW data center in the Paris region, and then to “multiple hundreds of megawatts” across Europe.

OpCore’s Paris sites were inherited from Scaleway, while the Lyon and Marseille sites were likely inherited from Iliad-owned MSP Jaguar Network (now known as Free Pro). The Polish sites were taken from Iliad’s Play/3S units.

Scaleway – formerly Online SAS/Online.net – was founded as a hosting company in 1999. The company launched a colocation division after acquiring Alice ADSL from Telecom Italia’s French unit in 2008.

The data center unit can trace its roots back to ISDnet in 1999. The company was first bought by Cable & Wireless in 2000, then Tiscali France in 2003. Tiscali’s French operations were then sold to Telecom Italia’s French subsidiary Alice in 2005, before being bought by Iliad three years later.

Scaleway was one of the dozens of companies that put their hat into the ring to host one of the EU-funded AI Gigafactories. The company put in a bid under the AION consortium name, proposing to host hundreds of thousands of GPUs at a 200MW development. Scaleway says it already hosts some 5,000 GPUs.