At the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence in February 2025, Emmanuel Macron pledged to make France a hub for data centers and touted €109 billion in private-sector investments towards reaching this goal.
This policy is by no means unique to France, as during the same Summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly launched “the world’s largest public-private partnership for the development of trustworthy AI”, totaling 200 billion euros. Many countries are experiencing a rapid build-up of new data centers, fueled by massive investments from Big Tech and the financial sector.
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Among the largest projects, a joint venture called Campus IA—bringing together the Emirati fund MGX, the French startup Mistral AI, Nvidia, and the public bank Bpifrance—plans to build a massive data center in Fouju, in Seine-et-Marne, which is expected to eventually reach a capacity of 1.4 gigawatts (GW). Google may build a 500 MW data center near Châteauroux (read our investigation), while Microsoft has set its sights on Alsace, in Petit-Landau, near Mulhouse, with a project whose annual electricity consumption, projected at 1.5 GWh, is equivalent to that of 280,000 households—as much as the city of Strasbourg.
Carried out in the name of ‘digital sovereignty’, France’s policy of supporting the construction of data centres appears, in reality, to be largely driven by Big Tech and their worldview of total digitalisation and the inevitable roll-out of AI. In practice, it primarily benefits major US corporations in the technology and finance sectors. French construction and electricity companies are hoping to secure a slice of the pie – which partly explains the complacency of the French authorities – but at the cost of, in the long term, cementing the subordinate position of the French economy within value chains controlled by US giants.
In this series of investigations, Observatoire des multinationales investigates the players behind the frenzy of data centre construction in France (and elsewhere), asking the classic questions: What will the real benefits be, and for whom? And what will the costs be?
