Digital Realty Launches New Data Center in Paris
Digital Realty's new data center in Paris marks a crucial step in the evolution of the European digital economy. #DataCenters #Paris
A former French Air Force base that sat empty for over a decade is about to become one of the most consequential pieces of digital infrastructure in Europe.
Digital Realty has broken ground on PAR15, the first building at its new Dugny Digital Hub campus northeast of Paris. This project isn't simply another data center coming online — it's the opening move in a phased development that will ultimately deliver 176MW of IT capacity across three buildings on a single reclaimed military site. For a continent scrambling to meet exploding AI and cloud infrastructure demand, that kind of capacity in that location matters.
The Dugny Site: Why This Location Is Significant
Dugny sits just outside Paris in the Île-de-France region, close enough to benefit from the metropolitan fiber ecosystem but with the land footprint that central Paris simply cannot offer. The site was a French Air Force installation that's been vacant since 2011. Fifteen years of dormancy on a property this size, this close to a major European capital, is exactly the kind of opportunity large-scale data center developers hunt for.
Brownfield redevelopment like this is increasingly the only realistic path to building large campus-scale infrastructure near Tier 1 European cities — greenfield options near Paris are essentially exhausted.
Digital Realty has been eyeing the Dugny site since at least 2024. The decision to move forward now reflects both the urgency of capacity constraints across the European data center market and the operator's confidence in sustained hyperscaler and enterprise demand for Paris specifically. Digital Realty already operates around a dozen data centers across the Paris metro area, so this isn't a speculative bet on a new market — it's a calculated expansion in a region where they already have customers and connectivity infrastructure in place.
PAR15: What the Numbers Actually Mean
The first building, PAR15, is a three-story facility spanning 23,320 square meters — roughly the floor area of three large warehouses stacked vertically. At full build-out, PAR15 will deliver 66MW of IT capacity. To put that in context: 66MW can support tens of thousands of servers running continuously, which is roughly what a large cloud region or a significant AI training cluster requires.
Construction began in December 2025 and is being delivered in four phases. Phase one — 12MW — is targeted for delivery in 2027. That timeline is aggressive but not unusual for hyperscale-class builds in Europe when a competent general contractor is already in place.
The phased delivery model is a smart hedge: it lets Digital Realty bring capacity online incrementally while managing capital outlay and matching supply to signed demand.
The 12MW first phase is the hook that anchors customer commitments. Once tenants are in the building and operational, the remaining phases follow on a path that's far less speculative than the initial groundbreaking.
Equans Data Centers: More Than a Contractor
Digital Realty selected Equans Data Centers as the general contractor for the design, construction, and commissioning of PAR15. Equans isn't a newcomer to this work — as a subsidiary of the Bouygues group, it has delivered 340,000 square meters of data hall space and over 790MW of IT capacity across its project history. That's a substantial portfolio, and it includes previous work with Digital Realty in France.
The appointment of Equans as a "strategic general contractor" — not just a construction vendor — signals something worth noting. In mission-critical infrastructure, the GC relationship goes far beyond pouring concrete. Commissioning a data center involves coordinating electrical infrastructure, cooling systems, fire suppression, redundant power paths, and network connectivity into a functioning whole that must perform at five or six nines of availability from day one. Digital Realty's regional construction director David Montrieux specifically cited Equans' ability to "lead an experienced consortium" — meaning Equans is orchestrating multiple specialized subcontractors across a complex, multi-phase build.
For a project of this scale on a brownfield site with site-specific challenges (former military land often carries environmental remediation considerations), having a contractor with established process discipline is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.
Xavier Perdereau, EVP at Equans Data Centers, described the Dugny project as a "build-to-suit development" — language that strongly implies anchor tenant commitments are already in place. That's a meaningful signal about demand visibility. Speculative builds of this scale don't happen.
What This Signals for the European Data Center Market
Paris has emerged as one of the top-tier data center markets in Europe alongside London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Dublin — the so-called FLAP-D cluster. But the dynamics within that cluster have shifted. Amsterdam imposed a moratorium on new data center development for years due to power grid pressure. Dublin has faced similar constraints. Frankfurt and London remain competitive but expensive. Paris has benefited from these pressures elsewhere, attracting investment from operators looking for viable large-scale development sites in Western Europe.
The Dugny Digital Hub, at full build-out, will represent one of the largest single-campus data center developments in France — 176MW across more than 65,000 square meters of IT space.
France's relatively favorable power mix — heavily weighted toward nuclear, which carries a lower carbon intensity than most European grids — also makes it attractive for operators with sustainability commitments. Data centers running on a predominantly nuclear grid have a fundamentally different emissions profile than those on gas-heavy grids. For hyperscalers with net-zero pledges and enterprise customers increasingly scrutinizing Scope 3 emissions, that matters operationally, not just reputationally.
PAR16, PAR17, and the Long Game
PAR15 is the first building on what will eventually be a three-data-center campus. PAR16 and PAR17 will follow, completing a hub that totals 176MW and nearly 700,000 square feet of IT space. The full Dugny Digital Hub will be one of the largest single campuses Digital Realty operates in Europe.
Campus-scale development is the direction the industry has been moving for several years — and for good reason. A single-building data center is a facility. A three-building campus with shared power infrastructure, security perimeters, and interconnection fabric is an ecosystem. Customers who start in PAR15 can grow into PAR16 or PAR17 without changing their network architecture or renegotiating interconnection agreements. That stickiness is valuable for both tenant and operator.
The timeline to full campus completion hasn't been publicly committed, but the phased nature of PAR15 alone suggests a multi-year runway. PAR16 and PAR17 likely won't begin construction until PAR15's first or second phase demonstrates sufficient demand absorption — though site preparation work may run in parallel.
For infrastructure investors and developers watching the European market, the Dugny project offers a useful case study in how to unlock stranded urban-adjacent land for digital infrastructure. The playbook — identify former industrial or government sites, navigate environmental and zoning processes, secure anchor tenant demand, then build in phases — is replicable. Paris won't have another vacant Air Force base, but comparable opportunities exist in other European markets where Cold War-era military consolidation left large parcels idle near major cities.
The data center in Paris that breaks ground today on a dormant runway may well be the one that handles a significant portion of Europe's AI inference workloads by 2030. That's not a prediction — it's the trajectory the numbers point toward.
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