“Digital sovereignty will be my guiding principle,” says Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Affairs, in an interview with La Tribune. Since her entry into office in October 2025, she has been in charge of implementing a policy announced earlier that year by Emmanuel Macron at the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence (read our article). On that occasion, the President 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.

Ten months later, the government had secured nearly 90 billion euros of the 109-billion-euro target, according to La Tribune. The media estimated that 48 additional data centers were in the planning stages in France at the time. This would bring the total number of data centers on French soil to around 400, in addition to the 350 already functional ones, according to research by the collective “Le nuage était sous nos pieds,” and would make France the third-largest European market.

According to an advocacy paper produced by France Datacenter, the industry’s lobby group, 714 MW of new capacity was installed in the country in 2024, representing a 21% increase in one year. The data centers currently under construction or in the planning stages are becoming increasingly sizeable. In Lisses, in the Essonne department, Cloud HQ, a U.S. company, inaugurated France’s largest data center in 2025. It has a power capacity of 120 MW, which is equivalent to the energy consumption of the city of Cergy.

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.

Sovereignty, a “ buzzword used for political purposes”

Even before the AI Summit, the government had already taken steps to ease the conditions for setting up data centers. Since 2018, operators have benefited from a reduction in the electricity tax, which was further brought down by the 2026 national budget law. “This measure caused the number and size of data centers to skyrocket,” recalls a former member of an environmental commission responsible for evaluating project applications. “In 2020, most projects were estimated to consume around 80 megawatts (MW). By 2025, it’s closer to 250 MW.” Following the Summit, the government also identified 63 so-called “turnkey” sites ready to host new data centers. Passed in April 2026, Article 15 of the Economic Simplification Act classifies data centers as “projects of major national interest”, which allows developers to bypass existing environmental and urban planning regulations.

For Ophélie Coelho, a researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) and author of Géopolitique du numérique : l’impérialisme à pas de géants (Éditions de l’Atelier, 2023), “the French government is playing into the hands of Big Tech.” According to her, the term “digital sovereignty” used to justify this policy “is nothing more than a buzzword used by policymakers for political and marketing purposes. We cannot speak of digital sovereignty without addressing the dependency on foreign entities for building or powering data centers.” For example, U.S. Big Tech control nearly half of the undersea cables, through which nearly 99% of international data traffic travel. Nearly 90% of the graphics processors used in data centers are designed by the U.S. giant Nvidia.

“If we’re talking solely about sovereignty over stored data, hosting in France doesn’t protect us either,” adds the researcher. The Cloud Act, an extraterritorial law passed in 2018, effectively allows U.S. authorities to access data hosted by U.S. companies, even if their data centers are located outside the country, without having to inform the data owners. And “French actors account for less than 10% of the sector’s economic weight,” notes Antoine Fournier, president of Thésée DataCenter.

Who really benefits, in the end, from this boom of ever-larger data centers? To answer this question, Observatoire des multinationales has mapped the sector’s main economic players, drawing on the work of the collective “Le nuage était sous nos pieds” and our own research. While data centers remain largely owned or controlled by foreign companies—particularly U.S. companies—, a host of other sectors and interests is trying to take advantage of the current data center frenzy.

U.S. Heavyweights

Today, the top digital infrastructure operator in France is the U.S. multinational Digital Realty. It owns thirteen data centers in the Île-de-France region and five in Marseille, a strategic location due to the 18 undersea cables connecting the city to the rest of the world. Its global annual revenue has grown steadily since 2009, reaching $6.1 billion in 2025.

In 2019, Digital Realty acquired the Amsterdam-based company Interxion, which owns about fifty data centers in Europe, for $8.4 billion. This allowed it to surpass its main rival, the U.S. company Equinix, which runs 11 data centers in France and whose revenue is projected to reach $9.2 billion in 2025.

According to data collected by the company Hubblo and reported by AEF info, Digital Realty and Equinix have a capacity of 241 and 234 MW, respectively, in France. Meanwhile the U.S. telecommunication giant Cogent owns 16 data centers in France, but with a much lower total capacity, estimated at 10 MW.

These multinationals, unknown to the public, are “real estate companies specialized in colocation,” explains sociologist Clément Marquet, who studies the materiality of the digital technical system. “That is to say, they manage the real estate and the infrastructure for their clients, who reserve storage space within the centers.” "In Marseille, Digital Realty runs ’servers for Disney+, Zoom, as well as Thales, Microsoft, and even government servers operated by a joint-venture between Google and Orange,’ says the collective Le nuage était sous nos pieds. “Their strategy is to be the first to establish themselves in certain regions to take advantage of electric connection opportunities. They are looking to stay one step ahead of their competitors, due to the important profitability demands imposed by their shareholders,” Clément Marquet continues.

On a smaller scale, other players are attempting to carve out a niche for themselves. Notable examples include Opcore (82 MW) and Freepro (14 MW), both subsidiaries of the French group Iliad, owned by Xavier Niel; the French companies Thésée DataCenter (12 MW) and Eclairion (60 MW); the Japanese firm Telehouse (63 MW); the U.S. giant IBM (39 MW); and the British company Colt Technology Services (73 MW). The telecommunications company Orange also sells storage services within its three new next-generation centers. Their combined capacity, estimated at 60 MW, remains well below the 241 MW operated by Digital Realty. Conversely, its competitor, SFR—owned by Altice, Patrick Drahi’s group— sold its 257 local data centers (small facilities serving local businesses) in 2022 to Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, the investment arm of the U.S. bank. This transaction was aimed at reducing Altice’s debt, as the group is expected to sell SFR to its competitors.

The most successful French colocation operators are OVH Cloud, which surpassed the €1 billion revenue mark for the first time in 2025, and Data4. The former state-owned company TDF manages four data centers, but with a total capacity of 10 MW, compared to 104 MW for OVH and 48 MW for Data4. Despite their French origin, Data4 and TDF are both owned by the same Canadian firm, Brookfield. This investment fund purchased Data4 in 2017 and has owned TDF since 2015, although it has been seeking to divest itself of the latter for several years now.

Among the potential buyers is French investment fund Ardian (formerly Axa
Private Equity), which manages over 200 billion in assets. Ardian also acquired the
British company Verne in 2024, which manages three data centers located in Finland, Iceland, and England, and plans to invest “several billion euros” in France, according to Roland Chedlivili, head of Verne France, in an interview with La Tribune.

Financial Bubble

The growing presence of major financial players is no coincidence. Many data center operators also have asset management funds among their shareholders, in particular Vanguard and BlackRock, whose asset portfolios total trillions of dollars. The financial giants also hold stakes in Big Tech companies and firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and have every interest in facilitating the massive rollout of AI, by encouraging the construction of new data centers, which they finance through investments and via bank loans (and, in BlackRock’s case, directly through its infrastructure-focused subsidiary, GIP).

The sector has grown so rapidly that traditional funding channels, such as banks, are no longer sufficient. Operators are turning to investment funds to borrow the money needed for their projects. This trend worries some observers who fear the formation and thus the burst of an economic bubble. According to the Bank for International Settlements, loans from private debt funds to the AI sector have risen from virtually zero in 2015 to $200 billion by early 2026. They could reach $600 billion by 2030.

The UAE sovereign wealth fund MGX, which specializes in AI, is a perfect example of the key role of financial institutions, as it plans to invest 30 to 50 billion euros in the Fouju data center (read our investigation). Other U.S. investment funds, such as KKR and Blackstone, and European ones like Balderton Capital, are also joining the fray and have announced that they will take part in the investment plan put forward by the European Commission at the AI Summit.

Le fonds souverain émirati MGX, spécialisé dans l’IA, et les 30 à 50 milliards d’euros qu’il prévoit d’investir dans le centre de données de Fouju, est une parfaite illustration de cette démesure financière (lire notre enquête : MGX, the shady Emirati fund behind France’s flagship “sovereign” data center project). D’autres fonds d’investissement étasuniens, comme KKR ou Blackstone, et européens comme Balderton Capital, sont également de la partie, et ont annoncé qu’ils participeraient au plan d’investissement initié par la Commission européenne lors du Sommet pour l’IA.

Big Tech “hyperscalers”

U.S. tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon also rely heavily on private debt—as well as reinvesting a portion of their profits to this effect— to finance their own data centers. According to L’Agefi, citing a briefing from Moody’s, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, Alphabet (which owns Google), and Microsoft put nearly $1 trillion in 2025 into building massive data centers, known as “hyperscalers.” Their operations, which generate massive amounts of data, require gigantic infrastructure, whether in terms of floor space or power consumption, as illustrated through Google’s project in Châteauroux, which could take up the equivalent of 273 football fields. This will not prevent them from continuing to rent servers in the data centers of other operators at the same time.

Amazon, through its subsidiary AWS (Amazon Web Services), opened its first data center in France in 2021 in Wissous, in the Essonne department. The company plans to invest one billion euros in expanding the data center, bringing its total capacity to 100 MW, which is equivalent to the energy consumption of a city of 60,000 residents. However, several organizations have filed a lawsuit contesting this strategy of gradually increasing the size of the infrastructure to circumvent regulatory constraints. Furthermore, Microsoft unveiled a four-billion-euro investment plan to expand its four data centers in France, in addition to the new one it plans to build in Alsace, as mentioned previously.

A Boost for Real Estate and Construction

Big Tech companies and operators such as Digital Realty clearly dominate the data center sector and are the primary beneficiaries of the current boom (along with chip manufacturers such as Nvidia). Nevertheless, other companies are also trying to get a slice of the cake, such as real estate companies that offer land for this type of infrastructure. Among the key players in France are Goodman, an Australian company; the British firm Segro; and Icade, a subsidiary of Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. The latter owns five data centers in France and plans to build two more, including a “hyperscaler” in 2031. The two important French real estate companies, Altarea and Nexity, also stand out. The former intends to build hyperscalers for the GAFAM companies, while Nexity has partnered with GSE, a data center construction specialist (which works for Digital Realty), to identify available land in France.

The French construction sector, particularly the giants Eiffage, Vinci, and Bouygues, is also benefiting from the investment boom. Through a subsidiary, Bouygues works with Digital Realty on the security and performance of its sites in Paris and Marseille. As for Eiffage, it was responsible for building the Lisses data center for the U.S. company Cloud HQ.

Through various subsidiaries (particularly Cegelec and CBI), Vinci builds both local and large-scale data centers, including for the Japanese company KDDI, owner of Telehouse, and Data4. Vinci also supports the U.S. groups Zayo and Digital Realty through the “Vinci Facilities Data Center”. A notch below, the French company Cap Ingelec claims to have built and renovated 1,800 projects in France and Europe. On its website, the company states that it has worked for a wide range of partners, including Equinix, Digital Realty, Telehouse, Data4, and TDF.

Equipment manufacturers and consultants also want a piece of the pie

Other beneficiaries of the construction of new data centers in France include companies that supply the equipment essential to the infrastructure’s operations, such as the cooling solutions offered by the German multinationals Kelvion and Siemens. The Swiss-Swedish company ABB also offers a wide range of equipment for data centers. In 2025, it attempted to buy its French competitor Legrand, which is also active in this sector and supplied equipment to aTelehouse data center in Paris. In 2024, this business accounted for no less than 20% of the French manufacturer’s revenue, which totaled 8.6 billion euros.

The Schneider Electric group, another pillar of the CAC 40, relies on 300 active partnerships, particularly with Data4 and Nvidia, to widen its range of electrical equipment for data centers. Other notable players include Bouygues subsidiary Axima, a fire safety specialist, and Rehlko (owned by a U.S. investment fund), which supplied the generators for the first center in Digital Realty’s Paris Digital Park in La Courneuve, Seine-Saint-Denis.

Numerous consultancies with different specializations have also entered the data center market. In the consulting sector, noteworthy examples include the French multinationals Bureau Veritas (€6.5 billion in revenue), which is purchasing dozens of companies to enhance its consulting services for operators, and Socotec (€1.8 billion in revenue), which works for the Campus IA joint-venture, mentioned earlier, and for the French company Eclairion. Another major player, the U.S. group CBRE, with revenue exceeding $40 billion, has been offering its “Data Center Solutions” service in France since 2018 to support companies in their rollout strategies.

Three names stand out among engineering firms. Firstly, there is the French firm EODD, which, according to our information, conducts most of the environmental impact studies for data center projects in France (for Equinix and Digital Realty, for example). The Canadian firm WSP, which works for Equinix and the European real estate giant Logistics Capital Partners, is also a key player. Finally, the consulting firm APL Datacenter also boasts an extensive client list, including Digital Realty, Equinix, and Data4.

Strain on the power grid

Since 2024, some power-hungry data centers have benefited from a “fast-track” procedure, which offers rapid connection to the power grid managed by RTE, a subsidiary of EDF. In 2025, RTE also signed a contract with Data4 giving it access to electricity from nuclear power plants for a period of 12 years, “on a cost- and risk-sharing basis.” The French electricity group, which belongs to the French government, has also put six sites—formerly occupied by its own facilities—up for sale to operators. In Montereau-Fault-Yonne, in Seine-et-Marne, Opcore (a subsidiary of Iliad) plans to invest €4 billion in a data center with a capacity of several hundred megawatts on the site of a former coal-fired power plant.

On the private side, TotalEnergies has signed several contracts to supply operators with renewable electricity, such as Orange in France, but especially in other countries: with Google in the United States, Data4 in Spain, or to eventually replace the generators in Microsoft’s data centers with high-efficiency batteries.

Securing the electricity supply necessary for digital infrastructure is a strategic issue. According to RTE, the share of electricity consumed by data centers is expected to triple by 2035, up to 4% of national consumption. This could eventually strain the network, as is the case in Ireland, where 22% of the country’s electricity now powers data centers. “We believe there will be conflict,” warns Pauline Denis, an engineer at The Shift Project, in an interview with L’Usine Nouvelle. “Especially since data centers are highly concentrated in two regions, Marseille and Île-de-France, where they are already putting increased pressure on local grids.”

Dependency

While the boom of data centers in France benefits certain domestic companies, it is far from evening out the economic equation, and even further from enabling any form of “sovereignty” over the sector. “There is a certain naivety on the part of policymakers who seem unaware of Big Tech’s imperial ambitions,” says Ophélie Coelho. Although she notices growing awareness of digital dependency issues among some, the researcher laments the absence of a genuine French and European industrial policy: “Instead, we continue to depend on Big Tech with laws that are not designed for French companies in this sector.”

Admittedly, after years of controversy, the government has finally entrusted the French population’s health data—previously outsourced to Microsoft—to a French company, Scaleway. But the door still remains to wide open to multinational data center companies for increasingly controversial infrastructure, the benefits of which, if they actually materialize, will mainly translate into profits for Wall Street and the Silicon Valley.