Nvidia part of plans for mega 1.4 GW AI datacenter near Paris

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Europe's largest AI datacenter campus is to be built near Paris in France, according to blueprints released by a joint venture formed by Nvidia, Mistral AI, the French national investment bank, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) investment fund MGX.

The 1.4 GW beast was made public at the Choose France Summit held in Versailles this week, and builds on broader AI cooperation agreements backed by the French and Emirati governments.

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The joint venture is to develop Europe's first "purpose-built" hub intended to support the entire AI lifecycle, from model training and inference to deployment of generative and applied AI systems. The site is expected to ultimately reach a total capacity of 1.4 GW.

Construction workers are expected to break ground in the second half of 2026, with operations scheduled to be up and running by 2028.

No financial sums were disclosed from this meeting, but France and the UAE previously floated figures of €30 to €50 billion ($33 to $56 billion) to be spent on an AI datacenter campus during talks that coincided with the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris in February.

According to the latest plans, the unnamed site will feature low-carbon hyperscale datacenters optimized for AI, with an open platform including exascale-class compute capabilities and sovereign cloud integration.

It is intended to support the broader adoption of AI in a variety of fields such as healthcare, mobility, energy, finance, and manufacturing, while advancing Europe's "digital and climate sovereignty."

The UAE's tech sector, meanwhile, as we pointed out in February, has been cosying up to several high profile AI infrastructure providers including Microsoft and Cerebras, in efforts to insulate itself from export controls on US-designed accelerators crucial to AI development.

No mention was made of where the energy to power this 1.4 GW monstrosity will be found, which is already one of the most pressing concerns for firms building datacenters. Unlike some countries, France does have plenty of nuclear energy on tap, and perhaps it is no coincidence that EDF Group is named among the ecosystem of partners said to be already signed up for the project.

Speaking about that country's electrical grid, Digital Realty MD Fabrice Coquio told us in April: "Even in France, where we've got excess of power production for the coming 15 to 20 years, which is also a unique situation in Europe, everywhere we've got the same problem. It's not the power production, it's the grid distribution, which is a bottleneck, and it's the reason why, in the last five, six years, it became much more expensive and took much longer in terms of waiting for getting the connection to the grid."

He added at the time: "That's the reason why the French government has launched a plan further to the AI summit in early February, that [power company] EDF will provide some piece of land they've got close to some nuclear plants or other electrical plants to provide direct capacity."

As for planting a DC closer to the capital, he said: "The problem is that they [nuclear plants] are not located where we need them. In France, we need them in Paris and Marseille, and instead they are in the countryside, not exactly where we need them," he added.

Others involved in the mega DC project include French construction firm Bouygues, national electricity transmission operator RTE, fiber network biz Sipartech, plus academic and research institution the Ecole Polytechnique.

"France has the ambition and capability to lead in this new AI era," said MGX chief exec Ahmed Yahia.

"At MGX, we see AI as the most transformative force of our time, and believe open, enduring infrastructure is key to unlocking its broad societal impact. The France AI Campus will accelerate breakthroughs across science, education, public services, and business, fueling Europe's next wave of innovation."

Nvidia's role in all this is presumably to ensure there are enough GPU accelerators and rack-scale AI systems to fill the data halls of this campus. The company was unwilling to provide any details beyond what was announced here, but did supply a quote from the prophet of AI, its CEO Jensen Huang.

"The AI Campus will be a transformational infrastructure for France - built in France, to fuel France in the era of AI. It will revolutionize science, education, and industry," he said in a statement.

Not everyone is convinced, at least not yet, by all this talk of the AI revolution. ®

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