France is staking its claim at the heart of Europe’s artificial intelligence race. Global private investment firm Ardian and its portfolio company Verne, a leading European platform for low-carbon and high-performance computing infrastructure, have jointly announced plans to develop a next-generation digital infrastructure campus in the Île-de-France region — a project that carries an investment commitment of up to €5 billion and a target capacity of 500 megawatts (MW).
The announcement was made at the Choose France conference, the government-backed summit designed to attract international investment, signalling not only the scale of private-sector confidence in France’s AI ambitions but also the country’s strategic intent to become a sovereign force in European computing.
A Campus Built for the AI Era
The planned campus will function as a comprehensive hub covering the full AI value chain — from raw computing power to downstream industrial applications spanning research, healthcare, finance, and energy. It will house a dedicated data centre designed to support high-performance computing (HPC), AI model training, and advanced industrial workloads.
The project will unfold in phases. An initial capacity of approximately 200+ MW is targeted by 2030, with the full 500 MW build-out completed thereafter. The campus will be strategically located within one of France’s largest industrial zones, offering the logistical and energy infrastructure necessary to sustain operations at this scale.
Critically, the facility will be powered by low-carbon electricity, leveraging France’s high-capacity energy grid through close collaboration with transmission system operator RTE and the EDF Group — a partnership that positions the campus as one of Europe’s most energy-responsible AI infrastructure projects.
Supporting European Digital Sovereignty
Beyond raw capacity, the initiative carries significant geopolitical weight. The campus is set to become part of the sites supporting the AION consortium’s bid for a French Gigafactory under the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative — a flagship European programme aimed at building sovereign, large-scale AI computing capabilities on the continent.
The hub is being designed in close collaboration with local authorities and a broader ecosystem of industrial, energy, technology, and academic partners. In doing so, Ardian and Verne are positioning the campus not merely as a data centre, but as a strategic anchor for France’s digital and industrial sovereignty — and by extension, Europe’s.
Speaking to the ambition of the project, the partnership reflects a conviction that Europe must develop indigenous AI infrastructure to remain competitive against the United States and China, both of which have significantly outpaced the continent in AI compute investment to date.
Ardian and Verne: A Strategic Alliance
The announcement draws together Ardian’s formidable capital deployment capabilities and Verne’s specialist expertise in sustainable, high-performance data centre operations. Ardian acquired Verne Global — the predecessor platform — to build out a European infrastructure play focused on low-carbon computing, a thesis that now finds its most ambitious expression in this Île-de-France campus.
The project is understood to be one of the largest single-site digital infrastructure investments in French history, and among the most significant AI-focused capital commitments in Europe to date.
Broader Market Context
The announcement comes at a moment of intense global competition for AI infrastructure dominance. Hyperscalers including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have each pledged tens of billions of dollars in European data centre expansion over the coming years, often citing the region’s regulatory stability and renewable energy access as key draws.
France, in particular, has emerged as a preferred destination, buoyed by its low-carbon nuclear electricity grid, strong engineering talent base, and a government that has been increasingly activist in courting technology investment. The Choose France summit has become the flagship vehicle for this ambition, and the Ardian-Verne announcement is among its most consequential outputs.
For the finance, technology, and energy sectors — all of which are represented both in the campus’s target use cases and in Cosmopolitan The Daily’s core readership — the implications are material. Demand for AI computing resources continues to outpace supply globally, making large-scale, energy-efficient infrastructure of this kind a critical enabler for the next phase of enterprise AI adoption across industries.
Ardian is a world-leading global diversified private markets firm, managing or advising approximately $200 billion in assets on behalf of more than 1,700 clients — including governments, institutions, and private investors — across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Paris, Ardian operates across private equity, real assets, credit, and infrastructure. Its infrastructure platform oversees approximately $49 billion in assets under management, with a strong focus on digital infrastructure, energy transition, and strategic European assets. The firm is majority-owned by its employees and manages one of the most diversified private markets portfolios in the world.
Verne (formerly Verne Global) is a leading European platform for low-carbon, high-performance computing infrastructure. Operating data centres across Iceland, Finland, the United Kingdom, and France, Verne specialises in delivering sustainable, energy-efficient compute environments powered by renewable and low-carbon electricity sources. As a portfolio company of Ardian, Verne combines deep operational expertise in data centre design, construction, and management with a strategic commitment to reducing the environmental footprint of large-scale computing. The company serves a client base that includes AI developers, research institutions, and enterprises running complex, energy-intensive workloads.
Cosmopolitan The Daily is a global business publication delivering comprehensive news coverage and in-depth market insights across the Finance, Technology, Energy, and Real Estate sectors. With editorial teams in New York, Toronto, London, Dubai, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney, the publication serves a readership of directors and executives from leading organisations worldwide. Our reporting is 100% original, offering authoritative perspectives and geographic specificity across the world’s most consequential markets. Each year, Cosmopolitan The Daily also recognises outstanding companies through its Business Excellence Awards, celebrating innovation and value creation across industries and geographies.