Investment firm Ardian and its data center platform Verne are to develop a new campus in France to support a planned ‘AI gigafactory’ bid.

The companies this week announced plans to develop a 500MW data center campus, with the first 200MW due by 2030.

The €5 billion ($5.82bn) project will be located near Paris in the Île-de-France region. Full details haven’t been shared. It will be Verne’s first project in France.

“Ardian’s strategy of investing in both essential digital and energy infrastructure is aligned with the European needs to strengthen its strategic capabilities and accelerate its progress toward digital sovereignty. By bringing together our industrial and financial knowledge with an ecosystem of leading French industrial partners, our ambition is to build a benchmark platform in the Île-de-France region gathering digital, industrial, and research serving Europe.” Mathias Burghardt, executive president of Ardian and CEO of Ardian France.

The development will be part of the sites supporting the AION consortium’s bid for a French Gigafactory as part of the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative.

Ardian announced it was joining Iliad/Scaleway’s AION consortium last month alongside the likes of Orange, Bull, and EDF. The consortium is looking to secure funding under the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative, which will see three to five supercomputing clusters built across the continent, each equipped with 100,000 AI chips for training the latest and most complex models.

“This project marks a strategic milestone in Verne’s development as a leading European platform for digital infrastructure dedicated to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. It illustrates our ambition to establish infrastructure in France capable of meeting the needs of major European industrial and technology players. We are building a competitive and sustainable European AI backbone of our economy,” added Dominic Ward and Roland Chedvili, CEO of Verne and managing director of Verne France.

Headquartered in London, UK, Ardian manages or advises on more than $190bn of assets. Ardian’s previous digital infrastructure investments include Spanish fiber-to-the-home company Adamo, Italian tower firm Inwit, and Germany’s EWE AG.

Ardian noted it is separately investing up to €3bn ($3.49bn) in new French energy infrastructure, representing 2.5GW of renewable energy capacity in the grid by 2030, through its Akuo and GreenYellow units.

Verne was founded as an Icelandic data center firm. After being acquired by D9 in 2021, it was merged with Finnish data center firm Ficolo and London’s Volta Data Centres.

The combined company was sold to investment firm Ardian in 2024 as D9 was wound down. The investor said that it would pump another $1.2bn into expanding Verne’s footprint across Northern Europe.

Today, Verne operates facilities in Iceland, Finland, and the UK. Plans for a Norwegian facility are also listed on its website. AI cloud Nscale is a known customer.