Ardian and Verne Plan 500MW AI Data Center Campus Near Paris to Support EU Gigafactory Bid
June 1, 2026
Ardian and Verne Plan 500MW AI Data Center Campus Near Paris to Support EU Gigafactory Bid
Investment firm Ardian and its data center platform Verne have announced plans to develop a 500MW data center campus in the Île-de-France region near Paris, marking a major step in Europe’s push to build sovereign AI infrastructure. The project, valued at €5 billion ($5.82 billion), will be Verne’s first development in France and is designed to support the AION consortium’s bid for a French AI Gigafactory under the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative.
The campus will be built in phases, with the first 200MW of capacity expected to come online by 2030. The companies have not disclosed the exact location or full details of the site. The announcement comes as Ardian and Verne join a growing list of partners in the AION consortium, which also includes telecom giant Iliad, cloud provider Scaleway, Orange, Bull, and energy firm EDF. The consortium is seeking funding from the EU’s AI Gigafactories program, which aims to establish three to five supercomputing clusters across Europe, each equipped with 100,000 AI chips for training advanced models.
“Ardian’s strategy of investing in both essential digital and energy infrastructure is aligned with the European needs to strengthen its strategic capabilities and accelerate its progress toward digital sovereignty,” said Mathias Burghardt, executive president of Ardian and CEO of Ardian France. “By bringing together our industrial and financial knowledge with an ecosystem of leading French industrial partners, our ambition is to build a benchmark platform in the Île-de-France region gathering digital, industrial, and research serving Europe.”
Dominic Ward and Roland Chedvili, CEO of Verne and managing director of Verne France respectively, added: “This project marks a strategic milestone in Verne’s development as a leading European platform for digital infrastructure dedicated to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. It illustrates our ambition to establish infrastructure in France capable of meeting the needs of major European industrial and technology players. We are building a competitive and sustainable European AI backbone of our economy.”
The project is part of a broader push by Ardian to expand its digital and energy footprint in Europe. Ardian, headquartered in London and managing over $190 billion in assets, has separately committed up to €3 billion ($3.49 billion) to new French energy infrastructure, representing 2.5GW of renewable energy capacity expected to be added to the grid by 2030 through its Akuo and GreenYellow units. The firm’s previous digital infrastructure investments include Spanish fiber-to-the-home company Adamo, Italian tower operator Inwit, and Germany’s EWE AG.
Verne was originally founded as an Icelandic data center firm and was acquired by D9 in 2021, then merged with Finnish data center company Ficolo and London’s Volta Data Centres. The combined entity was sold to Ardian in 2024 as D9 was wound down, with Ardian pledging an additional $1.2 billion to expand Verne’s footprint across Northern Europe. Today, Verne operates facilities in Iceland, Finland, and the UK, and lists plans for a Norwegian facility on its website. AI cloud provider Nscale is a known customer of the platform.
Source: datacenterdynamics
