Paris has long been one of the major European data center markets – the P in the region’s FLAPD crown.

The city of love’s affair with data centers goes back to the 1990s and the opening of the first Telehouse facilities in a former department store.

And as many markets have struggled and slowed – Dublin and Amsterdam both have moratoriums and restrictions – developers in France are putting their collective foot on the gas in the major hubs still open for business.

In France, dozens of operators, large and small, operate in and around Paris. Data Center Map lists some 119 facilities from 37 operators across the region, ranging from small Edge sites to major AI-centered hyperscale projects.

Already a well-established market, the capital city and the surrounding Ile de France region as a whole have been on a growth spree amid increased demand for data center capacity to serve AI, with France’s abundant nuclear power proving a powerful lure.

Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS), present in the land of the Coq Gaulois (Gallic Rooster, the national symbol of France) for some 25 years, is growing its footprint in France to cater to hyperscalers.

Colt confident in the Coq Gaulois

Originally known as City Of London Telecom and founded in 1992 with backing from Fidelity Investments, Colt Group has been fully owned by Fidelity since 2015.

The company has 13 operational data centers with an additional 19 in development across cities in the UK, Europe, and APAC. In Europe, the firm is mostly centered on the traditional FLAPD hubs, with Rotterdam and Berlin the exceptions.

In the age of the hyperscale customer, however, the veteran company has been evolving to offer larger single-tenant facilities and trimming its portfolio of retail colocation properties, with France a good example of its strategy.

In November 2021, Colt sold a portfolio of 12 non-hyperscale facilities across Europe to AtlasEdge, the new joint venture between Liberty Global & DigitalBridge.

The firm subsequently acquired 10 land parcels around Europe – including plots in London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Japan – that would see the capacity of its portfolio increase by more than 500MW.

One of those divested sites was its Paris North facility, leaving Paris South West (aka Paris1/PAR1) as its only data center in France.

“We’ve always followed our customers,” Jackson Lee, Colt DCS VP of corporate development, tells DCD. “Those sites we sold were small, retail sizes with a different customer base. We pivoted when we saw that there was a high degree of transition to the cloud. Our strategy is a cloud-first one, first and foremost.”

Located in the suburb of Les Ulis, the company’s one live campus in France offers 24MW. The site launched in 2001 in a former cold storage warehouse, with a second purpose-built building added for a hyperscale customer in 2023.

Having launched with just 600kW of colocation space, today the data center

hosts 14 halls with space totaling 23.6MW across 9,000 sqm (96,875 sq ft). The air-cooled site is a mixture of chilled water, adiabatic, and free cooling.

Growth happened slowly, then all at once. After the 2001 launch, the second and third data halls, adding another 1,000 sqm (10,763 sq ft) and 1MW of retail colocation capacity, didn’t come online until 2013. The entire site was still only 4.4MW by 2018, by which point the first two hyperscale-focused data halls opened for business. Today, some 7,000 sqm (75,347 sq ft) and 21.2MW of the site is dedicated to hyperscale customers.

Paris South West is an interesting mix of legacy and new-build hyperscale. But the rest of Colt’s footprint in France is set to be entirely new-build and largely geared towards hyperscalers.

Colt rebuilds in France

Colt broke ground on Colt Paris 2 in May 2025. The first of three data centers planned for a 12.5-acre site southwest of Paris in Villebon-sur-Yvette, the facility will offer 40MW at full build-out, with densities of 100kW per rack.

The move is part of a €2.3 billion ($2.58bn) investment in French infrastructure, which will see five data centers constructed by 2031, bringing Colt’s IT capacity in France to 170MW.

At the groundbreaking event attended by DCD, the company noted that the site has been in planning since 2021.

Originally set to use air cooling, the site is set to offer liquid cooling at the behest of the unnamed anchor customer, leading to a major redesign. Colt declined to name the Paris 2’s hyperscale customer, but DCD understands it is Microsoft.

Indeed, the new campus, at 18 Av. du Québec in Villebon-sur-Yvette, is based at a former Microsoft office. The cloud company had long exited the site, with another firm taking over for a time, but the so-called Papillon Building (aka Butterfly Building) will be demolished when Colt decides to spread its wings and develop the campus further.

Offering both hyperscale and colocation space, the site is set to host PAR2, PAR3, and PAR4, with PAR2 due live in 2028, and the others coming online in 2029. The site will be a mix of hyperscale and colocation buildings.

It will feature 1,975 sqm (21,258 sq ft) of rooftop solar, with waste heat being used to warm offices, as well as potentially powering an upcoming district heating network.

“I think there are some good things in Paris,” says Hedi Ollivier, director of development for the EMEA region at Colt DCS. “You have got a strong supply in terms of energy thanks to the nuclear power, and it’s low carbon. There’s a lot of capacity left available, and I don’t think we will suffer shortages like we’ve seen in Ireland or the Netherlands.”

Ollivier contends that the Paris market “is not as frightening as it seems,” despite worries voiced by many over France’s sometimes excessive bureaucracy. “You need to understand the administrative process and follow it properly,” he says.

Two other upcoming data centers, PAR5 and PAR6, at another new campus nearby in Les Ulis, are set to offer 45MW and 14.4MW from 2030 and 2031, respectively. This site will also have a mix of hyperscale and colocation buildings.

Quy Nguyen, Colt DCS chief sales officer, tells DCD that for now the hyperscalers are still being “cautious” and want flexibility from their data center providers, at least outside the US.

“They want to build capacity that can serve traditional commercial cloud, but they also want to be able to host AI workloads, whether it’s inference or different types of training models,” he says. “There’s this hybrid cooling approach seems to be what people are doing right now, at least internationally.”

Colo companies prepare for AI

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. While the likes of Digital Realty, Equinix, Data4, CyrusOne, and Colt have been present in Paris for years serving hyperscalers, demand is growing amid the ongoing AI boom.

AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, and Google are all present around the French capital. All the large US hyperscalers are looking to grow in the region. At the same time, French and European cloud players are growing their footprints, while a number of US AI and AI cloud companies – the so-called neoclouds – are also targeting Europe, with the likes of TogetherAI, Fluidstack, and Nebius looking at deployments in France, as well as local players such as Scaleway and OVHcloud.

Colt’s Lee says the company is “entertaining” hosting the neoclouds, but is being “cautious” about it. However, the company is confident that the risk of an AI or AI cloud firm they do lease to going bust would largely be negated by the location and flexibility of its facilities.

“Because we build our data centers to house both commercial cloud and AI, even if one of those customers does go bankrupt, we feel very confident that if they left the data center, we could bring in another customer,” Lee says. “We’re not worried about that type of obsolescence, because we’re building in locations that can serve both purposes.”

Nguyen says Colt is “agnostic” on whether US players or domestic operators represent the best opportunity for sovereign cloud or hosting capacity, but for now, it seems the US companies are still leading a lot of demand.

“As long as we pick sites that have good power,” he says, “whoever is going to be the nominated sovereign cloud hosting company, we’ll work with them.”

Colt’s Lee acknowledges there’s “a lot of talk” in Europe about developing a homegrown hyperscaler cloud, but “we just haven’t seen it just yet.

“It’s about having the right ingredients for being flexible,” he adds. “But most of our customers right now are US-based.”

On whether Colt will change its geographical approach to developing data centers and start chasing large-scale capacity outside the major metros into rural regions, Nguyen says the company’s focus is still to build in central locations where the availability zones are.

“The commercial cloud really hasn’t gone away, and we think it’s going to colocate itself with AI workloads, at least for now,” he says.

“We absolutely would look at some of those other markets,” adds Lee. “Our customers are constantly asking if this would be a target for us. Our priorities are obviously the Tier One markets, but Tier Two is certainly on our radar.”

While the industry has seen some major acquisitions in recent years, most of the large-scale data center purchases have been by investment firms, rather than tuck-in buys from the big players. Lee says Colt isn’t very interested in acquisitions unless its “very strategic.”

While the firm might consider an acquisition if it were to move into a new market, Nguyen says the company is more focused on “joint ventures where we think we need additional capability to accelerate” more than buying companies. Colt has signed JV deals with Mitsui in Japan and RMZ in India, and bringing outside investors into major hyperscale ventures is a common playbook amongst the likes of Equinix and Digital Realty.

Whether it’s for traditional cloud or the new wave of AI-centric GPU providers, the data center industry and Colt’s long love affair with Paris is yet to lose that romantic spark.