French AI consortium Aether Infrastructures has agreed to buy a site in Strasbourg for its first data center.

It has signed a preliminary sale agreement for the Dumarey Powerglide industrial site, located in the Port du Rhin district of Strasbourg.

As reported by DCD in July, Aether was formed with the aim of building two data centers as part of the European Commission’s AI gigafactories program.

Alongside the sale agreement, a lease has been signed to allow preliminary work on the complex, which will be known as FR-SXB1, to begin. As well as providing AI infrastructure, the site will host a biomass production plant.

The 90-hectare site formerly housed a factory that made gearboxes for vehicles. But it was earmarked for closure by Dumarey in January, with the loss of 320 jobs.

Partners in Aether include hardware firms SiPearl and 2CRSi, as well as real estate company Nhood and Dassault Systems.

Server maker 2CRSi will be involved in an on-site industrial facility for designing, assembling, integrating, testing, and qualifying data center modules. The prefabricated modules will then be deployed on the site, as well as being marketed to third-party customers. Aether believes it can eventually become Europe’s largest industrial site dedicated to artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The size of each module has not been disclosed, but the site has 25MW of grid power available, and Aether is investigating other solutions that could provide additional sources of energy, including a biomass power plant. As well as generating energy, this would produce biochar, a product that captures carbon and can be used as a soil enhancer by farmers and gardeners.

Aether has previously stated it is targeting a 2027 opening date for the data center. It hopes to close the purchase of its second campus location, FR-SXB2, by the end of the year. Across its two sites, it expects to have 42MW available.

Other partners in the scheme include chip firm SiPearl, real estate company Nhood, and Dassault Systèmes.

Aether is hoping to receive funding from the €20 billion ($22.8bn) EU gigafactories project. Announced in February 2025, it will see three to five large supercomputing clusters built across the continent to boost European compute power and digital sovereignty, each equipped with 100,000 AI chips for training the latest and most complex models.

Other gigafactory candidates include a French consortium led by Iliad and Dutch company Volt.