A 250MW data center campus to house sovereign AI infrastructure in France is being planned for the city of Bordeaux.

The campus would be built on the car park at Bordeaux’s Parc des Expositions. Totalling 20 hectares, the five-building campus would offer IT capacity of 250MW, though the site has 380MW of power available.

News of the data center campus was revealed earlier this month by Bordeaux’s Mayor Pierre Hurmic. Known as BXIA, it is being proposed by real estate asset manager Osae Partners and developer NFU.

According to local news outlet Sud Ouest, the site had been earmarked for an Equinix data center. The colo firm already operates one data center, BX1, in the city, announced in 2021 and designed by NFU. But it abandoned plans for a second, which led to the project being reimagined as a site for sovereign AI.

Speaking to Sud Ouest, Laurent Halimi from Osae Partners said the data center could house infrastructure for French companies such as AI lab Mistral, developer of the Le Chat chatbot, as well as large businesses such as Airbus. It is being backed by European investors.

Building the data centers is expected to cost €3 billion ($3.59bn), but this figure does not include the hardware needed to run the data center, which could take the total project cost to €12 billion ($14.35bn).

NFU’s Benjamin Delaux told Sud Ouest: “Our model isn’t a data center where Americans rent and there’s nothing more to see, nothing more to say. We advocate transparency.”

It will use a closed-loop system to keep water usage to a minimum, with the first building on the site set to come into service in 2028.

Bordeaux is currently home to eight data centers, per Data Center Map. The city is located near the landing station for the Meta-led Amitié subsea cable, a 6,800km route that opened in 2023 and connects the US with France and the UK.

Councilors will decide whether to approve a change of use for the land required for the data center at a meeting on Friday.