France Sees Massive Investment in Data Centers and AI

The numbers are staggering: €109 billion in future investments in data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) were announced at the AI Summit in early February, including €26 billion confirmed at Choose France on May 19th. This represents a gigantic leap compared to the €7 billion – already an impressive amount – unveiled a year earlier at the 2024 event organized.

A Deliberate Change of Scale

With the rise of AI, which demands significant computing power, especially for training language models on vast quantities of data, a wave of giant data centers is poised to sweep across France. Some projects envision unprecedented electrical power exceeding 1 gigawatt (GW), equivalent to the total of all data centers currently installed in the country, which are often dedicated to simple data hosting. This capacity approaches that of the Flamanville EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) nuclear reactor in the Manche region (1.6 GW).

Among the most prominent projects is that of the Emirati fund MGX, associated with the French artificial intelligence start-up Mistral AI and Bpifrance, which has reportedly chosen the ZAC (concerted development zone) des Bordes, in Fouju (Seine-et-Marne), to establish a data center with a power of 1.4 GW. This represents an investment of €8.5 billion. Another massive project, that of Data4, a subsidiary of the Canadian fund Brookfield, will be located in Cambrai (Nord), with a power of 1 GW and €10 billion in investments. This is in addition to the €2 billion committed by the same operator in Essonne (Marcoussis and Nozay). In Isère, the Oréus consortium, which includes the Emirati company G42, plans to modernize two data centers and ultimately increase their power to 1 GW.

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