Key Points:
- Orange SA and Morrison formed a 50-50 joint venture to build a €3 billion ($3.41 billion) French data center platform.
- The venture aims to expand Orange’s data center capacity tenfold to 400 megawatts to meet surging AI demand.
- Orange contributes five major data centers across four French campuses in Chevilly-Larue, Aubervilliers, Chartres, and Val-de-Reuil.
- Orange Business will act as exclusive distributor, strengthening European sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure.
French telecommunications giant Orange SA has partnered with global infrastructure investor Morrison to build a massive, sovereign data center platform across France. Entering into an exclusivity agreement to form a 50-50 joint venture, the two companies are launching a 3 billion euro ($3.41 billion) investment program aimed at scaling France’s digital infrastructure. The ambitious platform targets an operating capacity of 400 megawatts—expanding Orange’s existing French data center footprint nearly ten-fold to satisfy surging demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing workloads.
Under the 50-50 joint venture structure, the partners will fund the 3 billion euro platform through a combination of Orange’s existing real estate assets, fresh equity capital from Morrison’s global value-add strategy, and long-term project debt. Upon formal transaction closure, both shareholders will account for the venture under the equity method. The partnership unites Orange’s extensive industrial assets and enterprise sales network with Morrison’s specialized track record in global digital infrastructure financing.
As part of its capital contribution, Orange will transfer five major data center facilities across four strategic French technology campuses into the joint venture. The contributed assets include key facilities in Aubervilliers and Chevilly-Larue near Paris, alongside major regional hubs in Chartres and Val-de-Reuil. Orange will maintain direct operational and physical security control over dedicated server suites housed within these facilities, ensuring strict compliance with French and European cybersecurity and data sovereignty mandates.
The joint venture aims to solve a severe capacity bottleneck facing European enterprise cloud deployments. By expanding the platform to 400 megawatts of total power capacity, Orange and Morrison are creating one of the largest sovereign data center portfolios in Western Europe. The 10-fold scale-up allows the platform to accommodate high-density server racks, liquid-cooling hardware, and advanced artificial intelligence accelerators required by multinational corporations, public sector institutions, and technology startups.
Orange’s enterprise services division, Orange Business, will serve as the exclusive commercial distributor for colocation and cloud hosting offers generated by the new joint venture platform. The high-capacity data centers will function as the foundational infrastructure for Orange Business’s sovereign cloud, cybersecurity, and enterprise artificial intelligence solutions. Large enterprise clients, small and medium-sized businesses, and French government agencies can procure local, sovereign data hosting that complies with strict European data privacy laws.
Executive leadership from both organizations emphasized the urgent need for trusted, localized digital infrastructure across Europe. Orange Group Chief Executive Officer Christel Heydemann stated that France requires sovereign digital infrastructure to meet the exploding demand driven by cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Morrison Chief Investment Officer William Smales echoed those sentiments, noting that Europe’s digital future depends on substantial investments in trusted, energy-efficient infrastructure capable of processing data-intensive applications.
The 3 billion euro joint venture aligns directly with broader European Union initiatives to build sovereign digital infrastructure and reduce technological dependence on foreign cloud hyperscalers. By keeping sensitive data processing, government databases, and enterprise artificial intelligence workloads inside French borders, the platform provides local clients with legal protection against extra-territorial foreign data access laws. The venture guarantees that high-value intellectual property and sovereign data remain protected under French jurisdiction.
Orange and Morrison expect to finalize definitive transaction documentation by the end of 2026. Following required employee representative consultations and regulatory approvals from French and European competition authorities, the partners expect the joint venture to close formally in the first quarter of 2027. The phased rollout of new data center construction will begin immediately following transaction closure, with initial new power capacity coming online in late 2027.
The multi-billion-euro alliance between Orange and Morrison marks a transformative milestone for Europe’s digital infrastructure landscape. As generative artificial intelligence models require exponentially higher electrical power, advanced liquid cooling, and localized data storage, traditional telecom operators are joining forces with private equity investors to fund capital-intensive data center builds. By scaling capacity to 400 megawatts, Orange and Morrison are establishing France as a primary European hub for sovereign cloud computing and artificial intelligence development through the next decade.
