October 23, 2025
Global payments giant Mastercard has unveiled plans to invest approximately €250 million ($289.81 million) to develop three new data centers in France. This significant investment is part of the company's broader strategy to expand and modernize its European technology infrastructure.
The new facilities will augment Mastercard's existing European network, which currently consists of more than a dozen data centers. Specific details regarding the locations of the French sites or whether the company will build its own facilities or lease space in colocation data centers have not yet been disclosed.
In a formal announcement, Kelly Devine, President of Europe for Mastercard, explained the strategic rationale behind the expansion. "That’s why we’re transforming our technology footprint, enabling the localization of our payments infrastructure to create a sustainable, distributed network that can run anywhere," Devine stated. "This means always-on infrastructure and reduced vulnerability and greater resilience to natural or geopolitical events."
Globally, Mastercard operates an extensive network of approximately 60 data centers, as confirmed in a recent interview with George Maddeloni, the company's Chief Technology Officer of Operations. While at least one major facility is known to be in St. Louis, Missouri, the company typically does not publicize the specific locations of its data centers for security and resilience reasons.
Maddeloni noted that the global portfolio is a mix of company-owned facilities and a larger number of colocation spaces. These data centers are strategically positioned in every region where Mastercard processes customer transactions. Supporting this physical infrastructure is a robust backbone network utilizing multiple 100-gigabit transport links and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology.
In addition to its physical data center footprint, Mastercard also leverages major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, for internal application deployments.
This move by Mastercard follows similar infrastructure investments by its competitors. Earlier this year, rival Visa launched a new data center in Johannesburg, South Africa, and announced plans for another facility in Nigeria, highlighting the ongoing global expansion and localization efforts within the payments industry.
SOURCE DCD
