Description
Paris, France is one of the four primary FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) data centre markets in Europe. Marseille is a major connectivity hub – and an increasingly important content hub – between Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific through which Internet traffic is routed up to Paris.
France was late to the game in terms of cloud deployments and enterprise cloud adoption but has caught up quickly in the wake of the pandemic, and the Paris data centre market is set to overtake Amsterdam in the near future in terms of built out MW capacity. In contrast, the French government is positioning the country as a top AI destination in Europe and has secured investment commitments from data centre operators, hyperscalers and AI companies for in-country AI infrastructure, much of which will land in Paris. The proliferation of nuclear power, with lower power pricing than the other FLAP markets and many other countries in Europe, is a key driver.
Long before the government jumped on the AI bandwagon, local webscalers OVHcloud and Scaleway both launched GPU-as-a-service offerings back in 2023, the latter claiming French neocloud Mistral AI as an early customer. Mistral AI itself is part of a consortium with NVIDIA and others planning a 1.4GW data centre in Paris. Another home-grown neocloud, Sesterce, has taken down capacity with third party providers in both Paris and its home city of Marseille, and is planning self-builds elsewhere in the country. Private AI deals have already landed in Paris, and enterprise (retail+) deals are growing both in capacity requirements and number.
Sovereign cloud – and by extension sovereign AI – is high on the agenda in France, and Google and Microsoft’s partnerships with local entities aim to provide competition to the webscalers. Cloud is still the main driving force behind the Paris data centre market and there are no signs of self-build activity following AWS’s failure to garner local support, which ultimately led to it abandoning a self-build. But both Microsoft and Google have plans for self-builds elsewhere in the country, which will likely be for AI workloads given the distance from both Paris and Marseille.
Digital Realty has a stranglehold on the Marseille market and is busy building its fifth data centre and planning a sixth, its first outside the port area. The build sizes have got progressively larger to meet demand from hyperscalers, content providers and enterprises, as well as new subsea cables that continue to land. It will face some much needed competition from Telehouse’s first stand-alone facility in the city, although it is unlikely to go online until 2028. Digital Realty’s MRS6 and Telehouse’s new build will each deliver 50MW of IT load.
This report is an excellent resource for any service provider, investor, real estate developer or enterprise end user looking to understand and project the data centre market in Paris or Marseille, or find a service provider. Structure Research now has DCAI reports for the European FLAP markets plus Milan and Madrid in southern Europe, as well as a DCI Market Spotlight report on Rome. The methodology applied continues to be the most robust in the industry. The supporting dataset is built from comprehensive asset-level tracking, capacity is measured purely on a power basis, and inventory is aggregated in tiers according to build status, absorption rates and maximum capacity levels.
