In the grounds of Château de Bruyères-le-Châtel, a 19th-century castle located southwest of France’s capital city, Paris, sits a collection of buildings known as La Lisiere.

Since 2015, La Lisiere (which roughly translates to The Edge) has provided a low-cost space for exhibitions and performances, as well as a retreat for artists looking for somewhere quiet and reflective to stay while they get their creative juices flowing.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that less than 100 meters away from La Lisiere, a new data center is rising that will host one of the AI systems considered by many to present an existential threat to the creative industries.

The data center, being built on an adjacent plot by a new French operator, Eclairion, will host the first dedicated cluster of GPUs for Mistral, developer of the Le Chat chatbot and the company often lauded as Europe’s best home-grown hope of challenging the big US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Plans for Mistral’s new cluster were revealed in February, one of a string of infrastructure-related investments in France announced at the International AI Summit hosted by its President Emmanuel Macron.

Billions of Euros are set to pour into France over the next decade to fund a massive data center build-out that could create gigawatts of new capacity. And, in theory, France, which has lagged behind the other major data center markets in Europe in recent years, is well placed to capitalize on the AI boom, with plentiful space and nuclear power, and a president in Macron who has made growing the nation’s digital economy a priority since he first came to power in 2017.

However, some familiar barriers will need to be overcome if France is to outstrip its European rivals in the race for AI infrastructure supremacy.

This feature first appeared in DCD Magazine issue 57. Register here to read the full magazine free of charge.

There’s Paris, then there’s the rest

As befits one of Europe’s largest economies, France already boasts an active data center sector.

Paris represents one of Europe’s Tier One, FLAP-D markets, alongside Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Dublin, though when it comes to the volume of data centers, France as a whole is playing catch-up with some of its rivals. Data Center Map lists 265 data centers in France, compared to 427 in Germany and 425 in the UK.

Looking at data center locations within the country, the common French saying “there’s Paris, then there’s the rest” has never been more appropriate. The capital city accounts for 97 of the 265 facilities listed on Data Center Map, with no other hub coming close, and when it comes to the IT capacity of these facilities, the divide is even more stark. “Paris dominates to a large extent,” says Keith Breed, associate director in the research division of CBRE. “About 85 percent of all capacity in France comes out of the Paris area, particularly to the south of the city, where permitting and power are easier to come by.”

Elsewhere, Marseille’s status as a landing point for 12 subsea Internet cables, with five more set to come into service over the next two years, means it has attracted some data center developments. The market is dominated by Digital Realty, which has been active in the city since 2014 and operates four data centers, with a fifth in the pipeline.

Breed says France has often been overlooked by investors because of perceived barriers to doing business. “France has been a ‘Cinderella’ market over the last ten years,” he says. “It’s been a slight laggard compared to the other FLAP-D locations, but over the last two years, that has started to change. And in 2024, Paris overtook Amsterdam in terms of size and supply, so it’s now the third-largest market in Europe. That was a significant moment.”

This trend was also noted by Olivia Ford, research analyst covering France and Benelux for DC Byte. “2024 was the year we saw a bit of catch-up in France,” she says. DC Byte’s research from Q1 2025 shows that there is currently data center capacity of 283MW under construction in France, with 1.8GW of early-stage projects, with the pipeline having swelled since further since then. Overall, France is “arguably less mature” than the other FLAP-D markets, Ford says. But she adds: “It’s looking very healthy and compared to Amsterdam, for example, it has many larger scale developments going, particularly around AI data centers.”

Indeed, France briefly became the center of the AI universe in February, when the country hosted the International AI Summit. Alongside myriad photo opportunities for world leaders – and bilateral talks between slightly baffled-looking officials rapidly learning the difference between CDUs and GPUs – came a slew of announcements about investment in French digital infrastructure. In true government style, several of these were reheated versions of previously unveiled schemes, but plenty of new cash was also promised.

Private companies promising to invest in France during the summit included Abu Dhabi-based G42, which is planning to install AI infrastructure at a data center in Grenoble, while the United Arab Emirates government signing an agreement with their French counterparts for a €30-€50 billion ($34-$62bn) AI investment in France, including a new 1.4GW data center. Details of this were revealed at an investment summit in May, with French national investment bank Bpifrance, UAE investment fund MGX, Nvidia, and Mistral forming a JV to deliver the data center, which will be located on an undisclosed site outside Paris and could be operational by 2028.

Mistral had already announced it was setting up its first dedicated AI training cluster in France. The company, which this week announced a fresh €1.7 billion ($1.99bn) funding round, had previously relied on infrastructure from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to train its models, but will now be working with Eclairion and French GPU cloud provider Scaleway to bring an initial 18,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs online later this year.

In total, the French government claimed to have secured €110 billion ($112bn) for digital infrastructure. This dwarfs the funds being committed to rival FLAP-D markets: By comparison, the UK government, which is also on a mission to attract data center operators, says it has brought in £25 billion ($32bn) in investment since it took office in July 2024.

On the frontline

Ready to take a first-hand look at this French revolution, DCD arrives in Bruyères-le-Châtel, a sleepy commune of just over 3,000 people located in the Essonne department on the southern fringe of Paris, where Eclairion’s first data center will be located.

The site is a hive of activity, with construction workers milling around and a large group of investors shuttling in to meet the company’s CEO, Arnaud Lépinois.

The site itself is unusual in both shape and appearance. A long, narrow, plot, it is dominated by four enormous – and currently empty – steel girder platforms, each spanning 2,500 sqm (26,910 sq ft), which Eclairion’s Charles Huot says will eventually house the company’s modular data center solution.

Huot, the company’s head of development, is overseeing the Bruyères-le-Châtel build, meaning he is tasked with everything from ensuring construction crews are on task to checking on the health of the 1,500 saplings that have been delivered to the site ready for planting. He is a gracious and patient host, even as DCD somehow manages to lose a pair of safety shoes halfway through the site tour.

Eclairion was founded in 2021 and is funded by HPC Group, an investment firm with its roots in the hospitality industry. The company initially had more modest ambitions for the Bruyères-le-Châtel data center, Huot explains. “When we started in 2021, 1MW was a good amount of power,” he says. “We had 10MW available then, ready to deliver to ten containers, and we were ready to receive customers.

“Now, Mistral will take all the power we have, but will only use half the space.”

As the AI revolution took hold, Eclairion scaled up its plans, and Mistral will occupy two of the data center’s platforms, which will be supplied with 40MW of renewable energy via two dedicated substations run by grid provider Enedis. Its hardware, provided by Scaleway, will be housed in 66 large containers, each drawing 600kW and featuring 20 racks.

Putting the containers on a platform will enable the data center to be more flexible, and make running power and cooling systems to the modules, as well as performing maintenance, a much simpler task, Huot says. The space underneath can also be used to house additional equipment or for storage, depending on a client’s requirements. The data center’s liquid cooling system sits at the side of the platforms, ready to be connected as and when modules arrive.

Eclairion also believes the design offers sustainability benefits, making it easy for old containers to be taken away and put to use elsewhere. The first container on the site, a demonstration unit featuring regular CPU racks, is already on its second life, having previously been deployed at Renault as part of the automaker’s crash testing system for new vehicles.

“We think our design is unique in the world,” Huot says. “When we explained it to the engineers, they found it difficult to understand the concept.”

The Mistral deal was forged in summer 2024, with the French government reaching out to data center providers to help ensure that the AI lab’s compute requirements could be met in France, rather than forcing it to move elsewhere in Europe. “No one else in France could find 40MW in 2025,” Huot says. “We were the only option.”

Accommodating Mistral has presented some logistical challenges for Eclairion; when DCD visits, a group of workers are busy digging out some of the tarmac under the platform where the GPUs will be housed, because the power transformers required are 30cm bigger than older generations and would not have fitted in the existing space. GPUs were scheduled to arrive on the site in June, with the data center due to be up and running before the end of the year.

Once Mistral is in situ, Eclairion will turn its attention to its other platforms. It has another 60MW of power guaranteed to arrive on site by 2027 via a different provider, RTE, and a queue of customers – mostly French companies deploying AI systems – ready to take space in future.

Twelve kilometers from Bruyères-le-Châtel, in the town of Marcoussis, another data center company has big plans to cater for the AI revolution. Data4’s vast Paris campus is already home to 21 data centers, with that number set to increase to 25 by 2027. In total, the site has up to 250MW available.

Accompanying DCD to the roof of one of the buildings, Jérôme Totel, Data4’s group strategy and innovation director, points across the fields into the distance, where several cranes are visible on the horizon. This is the site of the company’s new AI campus at Nozay, 5 km from its existing site and housed at the former Nokia France headquarters, which Data4 purchased in 2023. This will also be served by 250MW of low-carbon energy.

“The first data center will be up and running in 2027,” Totel says. “It will be completely dedicated to AI workloads and feature direct liquid cooling throughout.” The company already runs some AI servers at Marcoussis, and Totel says the rapid pace of the technology’s development means AI tasks will be performed across both campuses. The company provides colocation space for some of the biggest businesses in France, as well as catering to the needs of the hyperscalers.

“France needs a lot of data center space,” Totel says. “We hope we will continue to see demand from French companies, and we want to offer our existing customers space to grow here. But we’re also looking to other parts of the country.”

Data4, which is owned by investment fund Brookfield, is headquartered in France but operates in markets across Europe. At the AI summit, Brookfield pledged €20 billion ($20.7bn) for French data centers over the next five years, €15 billion ($17bn) of which will be funneled into Data4. This will fund development in Paris, as well as at other locations: The company has identified a site in Cambrai, northern France, which is set to host a 1GW facility. Located on the site of the former Cambrai-Épinoy airbase, work on this data center could begin in 2026.

Totel says Data4’s AI campuses are likely to be in locations like Cambrai, rather than close to the capital city, because the nature of AI workloads means they don’t need to be close to the end users. “We’re probably going to build the large campuses outside Paris,” he says. “At the moment, we don’t see a lot of AI applications that benefit from low latency.”

While both Eclairion and Data4’s campuses are set in relatively rural locations, Digital Realty’s Paris Digital Park, in La Courneuve, is just 7 km from Paris city center and surrounded by homes and businesses. The impressive circular construction resembles an enormous wheel of cheese divided into four pieces, but is actually four interlinked data centers catering for Digital’s enterprise and hyperscale clients.

Rogier van der Wal, senior director at Digital Realty, tells DCD the company has developed Paris Digital Park because it is seeing “strong demand” from enterprise customers in France.

When it comes to AI, Van der Wal says that while most of the firm’s French clients are consuming AI services through their cloud providers, some businesses in the country are getting more ambitious. “There is a set of customers that are mature enough to operate their own AI infrastructure,” he says. “They have the skill set to run GPUs, to write training algorithms, to do the training themselves, and then to use their infrastructure for inferencing.

“These tend to be larger, more mature, enterprises, who are knocking on our door and saying, ‘we’re in an old data center that can’t run the very dense workloads we require – can you help?’”

Colt DCS is another data center firm investing heavily in France, and broke ground on its second data center in France in May 2025.

The facility, Colt Paris 2, is the first of three data centers planned for a 12.5-acre site in Villebon-sur-Yvette, southwest of Paris. It is part of a €2.3 billion ($2.58bn) investment in French infrastructure, which will see five data centers constructed across two sites by 2031, bringing Colt’s IT capacity in France to 170MW.

Hedi Ollivier, Colt’s director of development for the EMEA region, is bullish about the market’s prospects. “The power grid is very strong and in terms of network, we’re very well connected,” he says. “And there’s plenty of land available. So I think France has a lot of potential, there’s a lot of capacity available, and I don’t think we’re likely to see the kind of problems we’ve seen in Ireland or the Netherlands, where it can be difficult to start building and get connected to the grid.”

Plug baby, plug

Central to France’s pitch to data center companies is its plentiful supply of low-carbon power, underpinned by its nuclear power plants. It has been a net exporter of electricity for many years.

“Last year [2024] we exported 90TWh, which means we can localize a lot of data centers on top of the electricity we need for our companies and households,” Macron told delegates at February’s AI summit, before referencing US President Donald Trump’s famous pro-fossil fuel mantra. “I have a good friend across the ocean saying ‘drill baby, drill,’” Macron added. “Here, there’s no need to drill, it’s just plug baby, plug.”

France has 17 operational nuclear plants, which are home to 57 reactors, all run by state-owned utility company EDF and providing 61GW of capacity. This is the second-largest fleet of active reactors in the world, with only the US possessing more nuclear power. Nuclear accounts for 60-75 percent of French energy generation on any given day, according to RTE’s power tracker, and the grid runs almost entirely on low-carbon sources, with hydro, solar, and wind installations providing the bulk of the rest of the nation’s electricity. By contrast, neighbors Germany and the UK typically source less than 20 percent of their power from nuclear plants.

This French affaire de coeur with nuclear stems from a government policy geared around energy sovereignty dating back to the 1970s. Many of the plants in service today first came online in the 1980s, and are now approaching the end of their lives, meaning a modernization program is underway. That initiative aims to increase the amount of renewables powering the French grid and reduce the reliance on nuclear so that it accounts for nearer to 50 percent of the nation’s energy needs.

As the energy mix in France changes, EDF is having to adjust its operations accordingly, with the country’s ARENH mechanism for nuclear power procurement set to come to an end in 2026. ARENH was conceived in 2011, and set a fixed price of €42 per MWh ($46.90) for purchasing nuclear power from EDF within a volume limit of 100TWh per year. It was designed to encourage competition in the market and enable French consumers to benefit from the lower prices associated with nuclear energy, while also providing EDF with a steady income that it could use to maintain the nuclear plants.

Views on whether the policy has been a success are mixed (EDF has broadly maintained its market share since it was introduced) but now that it is coming to an end, the price of buying nuclear energy from EDF is on the rise, and the state-backed utility could be left with an ARENH-shaped hole in its business model.

“When ARENH ends, there will be a move to power purchase agreements based on individual contracts,” says Jonathan Hoare, who covers the French power market for analyst firm Aurora Energy Research. “So far, this has been a temperamental transition for EDF because of some managerial changes in the company and uncertainty about what the future will look like.

“Whereas previously they had 100TWh contracted, we’re seeing nowhere near that kind of take-up under the new mechanism, and this is all happening in a climate where an increased amount of renewable sources are entering the system. So EDF is looking for replacement industrial off-takers for nuclear while this transition occurs.”

EDF, therefore, should be a match made in heaven for data center operators and their never-ending quest for power, and the utility company is doing its best to set up the conditions for a long and happy marriage of convenience. At the AI summit, the company revealed it was offering four plots of land it owns for possible data center developments, and aims to have another two sites out to tender by 2026. It says the initial quartet of sites have a total of 3GW of power available, and that building there could cut time to market. Earlier this month, it announced it was supplying 40MW of nuclear power to Data4 for its data centers.

Colocating data centers near existing power stations means “you’ve got base load consumption, and you have less losses in transmission,” Hoare says. “Nuclear plants are often located near large water sources because of the way the reactor technology works, so that can also potentially work well for cooling data centers,” he adds.

Europe’s AI capital?

In many ways, France seems like the ideal destination in Europe for data center operators, and CBRE’s Breed believes the nation’s power surplus could be a big draw, though he does not think the low-carbon nature of the French grid will be a factor in the decision-making of many developers.

“The biggest issue is the availability of power and the ability to scale,” he says. “Clean energy becomes a secondary factor for a lot of companies. If you’re a hyperscaler with ESG goals, it might be an important consideration, but I think for the other companies, such as the GPU clouds, it’s less important.”

Of bigger concern is the country’s notorious bureaucracy, which continues to be a sticking point for potential developments, he says.

“There’s a greater degree of delay involved in projects in France,” Breed says. “You don’t get the fast-track approvals you do in other countries. There’s central government, then the municipality, and then you might get the local mayor involved too, and suddenly you’re consulting with an awful lot of people, particularly if there are ecological concerns. The whole system is less connected than somewhere like the UK.”

The French government is making moves to try and speed up the planning process. Prior to last year’s snap election, which saw Macron’s parliamentary majority disappear and a hung parliament elected in its place, the president had been trying to push through legislation designating data centers as projects of major national interest, meaning the government could overrule local authorities to get digital infrastructure built. Now the provisions are back on the table as part of a wider economic “simplification” bill, which aims to slash red tape across the economy.

“Data centers aren’t currently in the scope of projects of national interest, so this could help accelerate urban planning rulings and electricity grid connections,” DC Byte’s Ford. “The government thinks it can reduce the time for planning approval from 18 to nine months, and though it would likely only apply to the biggest projects, this would be seen as something positive for the data center industry, especially as it encourages developments at a time when other European markets like the Netherlands and Ireland are restricting them.”

Debate on the legislation in the Assemblée Nationale began in April, but with 2,500 amendments already submitted, it is unlikely to be approved in short order.

For their part, Eclairion’s Huot and Data4’s Totel say their respective companies have garnered support from councils by building ongoing relationships with local politicians. Digital Realty, which announced at the AI summit it was planning to spend $5.5 billion on new facilities in Paris and Marseille, has also worked closely with local government on the redevelopment of the area around the Paris Digital Park, which was an abandoned Airbus factory before the data center firm moved in.

Of bigger long-term concern for DRT’s Van Der Wal are constraints on Paris. While the power availability situation in France is generally positive, the capital city’s grid is under strain, he says. “In the short term, things are looking good, but in the longer term, all the data centers in the extended Parisian area are going to be short of power,” he says. “We’re going to have to find a solution to that issue.”

This highlights another potential issue for the French market, the dominance of Paris at the expense of other regions. While this reflects the nature of the French economy, which is highly concentrated on the Ile-de-France region around Paris, data center operators will need to push into other parts of the country as competition for space and power in the capital hots up.

While Data4 is looking to Cambrai, Eclairion has set its sights on a former Arjowiggins paper mill in Bessé-sur-Braye, in the Sarthe department of northwestern France. Huot says the site already has 100MW available, and Eclairion plans to put its containers inside the existing building. Work on the data center, which is expected to cost €600 million ($675m) and has been approved by local officials, will get underway in 2026, with a view to a 2028 opening.

Ford says that, outside of Paris and Marseille, significant clusters of data centers have yet to emerge in France, but believes cities like Lille are starting to attract attention. She says the hyperscalers could change this equation if they decide to build their own facilities. Microsoft announced last year it was planning to construct a data center in Mulhouse, in the Grand Est region of eastern France. It would be the first hyperscaler-built facility in France, but the status of the project is unknown amid reports that the cloud giant has been pulling back from some of its plans for Europe. Microsoft has not commented on its plans for France.

“The hyperscalers don’t have any self-builds in France yet,” Ford says. “There’s scope there for them to increase their presence in France, but it will be interesting to see if they maintain their colocation strategy or start building for themselves.

“That’s definitely something to keep an eye on as we wait to see how many of the announcements from the AI summit actually come to fruition.”