By Forrest Crellin and Leo Marchandon
PARIS, May 20 (Reuters) – The AION consortium, which groups some of France’s biggest tech and infrastructure companies, will seek EU funding for an expected €10 billion ($11.60 billion) data centre it plans to build in France.
To try to close the gap between Europe and the United States and China, which have invested heavily in high-capacity data centres, the European Union’s executive in December launched a €20 billion fund to boost investment in AI infrastructure.
The AION consortium, formed last year to respond to EU efforts to become more internationally competitive on AI, comprises tech companies Artefact, Bull and Capgemini, telecoms Orange and Iliad including its data centre arm Scaleway, private equity firm Ardian, and French utility EDF.
Ardian’s head of infrastructure investment Benoît Guillochet said the French project alone could cost the equivalent of half of the EU’s new fund.
He said he expected funding from a combination of private investors, including Ardian, and bank lending, as well as EU fund money.
Iliad said it was ready to deploy €4 billion, notably through its datacentre arm Scaleway.
Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas said the ultimate aim was for the data centre to have a gigawatt of capacity, effectively doubling France’s computing capacity, and that the initial phase would probably be around 100 megawatts.
EDF said last year that it was opening calls for tenders for several of its old industrial sites with direct grid connections so data centre operators can speed up the time needed to get linked up to power supplies.
($1 = 0.8623 euros)
(Reporting by Forrest Crellin in Paris and Leo Marchandon in Gdansk)
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