A consortium of three French entities has come together to set up a €100 million (US$118.5 million) campus with six data centre facilities in the Seine valley.

Thésée DataCenter (funded by French capital), the Banque des Territoires and real estate operator Groupe IDEC are taking on the endeavour that is designed to deliver 323,000 sq ft of hosting floor at full build across a three-hectare piece-of-land. Each party is contributing with a third of the total cost.

The first phase of the development, with a building named TDC01, is set to cost €15 million ($17.78 million) and deliver on 69,000 sq ft of space using free cooling technology made by Siemens. The first client, SAFEO, is set to move in in August 2021.

Thésée’s president Christophe Bouniol said the company intends to build a new facility every 18 to 20 months, providing buildings of Tier IV standards with a PUE of 1.2.

Bouniol said: “The establishment of these new facilities is strategically positioned between two other data centre areas, one served by Equinix and Interxion [a Digital Realty business] in the North and Scaleway in the South of Paris, without any energy constraints in this area of Yvelines. This allows a certain rebalancing in the Île-de-France.”

Éric Arbaretaz, co-founder and CTO of Thésée, added: “We will welcome our first customers in the summer, in August, for the set up first and then we will install the servers. Our first customer requires an enormous speed of several connections of 40 Gbt /s.”

Commenting on the expansion project, Lionel Mary, CEO of the Idec Invest, said: “We support this project because it is innovative. We have designed a building at the forefront of performance and data security.”