France boosts data center expansion amid pushback from residents

PARIS (CN) — Wissous, a 7,151-resident town roughly an hour south of Paris, resembles any other French commune; a 12th century church anchors playgrounds and tennis courts, steps away from residential buildings and daycares. Less common is the backdrop: a fenced-off, unmarked 592,000 square-foot data center.

The center is owned by CyrusOne, an American company whose largest client is Amazon Web Services. It arrived quietly six years ago, without consulting local residents, despite an initial thermal capacity of 19.8 megawatts — roughly equivalent to 20,000 space heaters running at once.

“Data centers are now associated with artificial intelligence, with all the fears, the advantages, the disadvantages,” Jean-Luc Touly, a member of the local organization Wissous Notre Ville and the city’s municipal council, said. He recently moved into a building less than half a mile away from the center. “But amid all of this, people are still learning about it — there’s no consultation, no explanation, one gets the impression that it’s being imposed upon you.”

Amid French President Emmanuel Macron’s push for digital sovereignty, data centers are becoming a mainstream issue. On May 31, Japan’s SoftBank pledged roughly $86 billion in French investment by 2031, including $50 billion for new data centers.

“This economic movement has received massive support from public authorities,” Clément Marquet, a researcher at the Center of Sociology of Innovation under Mines Paris, said. “In Europe, it has become a sort of competition, both intra-European and between states, to see who would manage to capture the most investment.”

Critics argue these projects are moving faster than the environmental and regulatory safeguards surrounding them. Data centers can consume enough electricity to power small towns, release heat into the atmosphere and use thousands of liters of water daily.

However, Arianna Crosera, a PhD researcher at the European University Institute whose thesis is titled “Regulating the environmental impact of the European Cloud,” explained that environmental protection remains one of Europe’s core values.

“Now we have this digital transition which is sort of clashing, and I think the point where it clashes is really in the data centers,” she said. “I think they’re sort of the nexus between a clash of values that the EU is trying to achieve with different legislation, because that’s what we do, we regulate a lot — at least that’s what they say, right?”

But local communities are often left out of the big picture, multibillion-dollar plans.

“We have a political divide that is growing between the defense of local interests, even if they’re not necessarily understood in a homogeneous way, against the national strategy,” Marquet said. “So this will touch upon environmental and electrical concerns, and all that entails.”

Philippe De Fruyt, president of Wissous Notre Ville and a former municipal candidate, runs the group from his backyard garage. On Friday, he and Touly sat at a wooden table covered in binders and legal documents.

De Fruyt said the group was first alerted to the dangers of the CyrusOne data center by a whistleblower in 2020, warnings the previous mayor brushed aside.

“Since it was during the municipal campaign, the outgoing mayor explained that we were saying this [criticism] out of spite and in truth, we hadn’t understood anything,” he explained. “That generators like the one were in every hospital and clinic, that it posed no problem at all, that there was really no reason to be worried, and that things would be better after the data center than before — he practically claimed it would make the flowers grow.”

Because the facility sits in the middle of town, De Fruyt and Touly said residents are particularly concerned about heat and noise. Those concerns could grow if CyrusOne moves ahead with plans to expand the site from its current capacity to 49.5 megawatts under “Phase 2,” with a long-term goal of 60 megawatts under “Phase 3.”

De Fruyt said the expansion would require tapping into a larger power source elsewhere in Wissous. According to project documents, that would mean constructing two high-voltage transmission lines that could pass near homes. “How would you feel if someone said, ‘Hey, good news, two 225,000-kV lines are going to pass five feet from your bedroom?’” he asked.

“We have a huge pile of disadvantages for zero benefits,” De Fruyt said. “And what ends up — excuse me — pissing us off as French people is that they tell us, ‘Yes, but sir, madam, national sovereignty,’ and at that point I roll on the floor laughing.”

Wissous Notre Ville, which has 30 members, has been pursuing legal action against the project — alongside the NGO France Nature Environment and the association Data for Good — since 2021. So far, the courts have been ruling in favor of CyrusOne; in April, the Versailles Administrative Court of Appeal authorized the company to continue its expansion.

The group is now determined to bring its case to higher courts, at the EU level if necessary.

“It’s not up to a few people to decide for everyone else,” Touly said.

CyrusOne did not respond to comment by the time of publication.

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