Seen from the sky, it might seem like one more logistics zone. Concrete bars aligned with a straight line. Technical roads, fences, electrical transformers. Nothing spectacular, except that what is being built today in certain French countryside is neither a warehouse, nor a factory, nor a power station.
It is the physical infrastructure of artificial intelligence, and its scale no longer has much in common with what digital technology has produced so far.
In Fouju, in Seine-et-Marne, the Campus AI project plans twelve buildings dedicated to computing spread over seventy hectares and an electrical capacity of up to 1.4 gigawatts. Just a few months after its launch, Bpifrance, Mistral AI, MGX and NVIDIA announced their intention to increase the program to 3 gigawatts thanks to a second site whose selection is imminent. This simple figure is enough to measure the change in the nature of the phenomenon. Three gigawatts are no longer part of the usual vocabulary of the digital economy. We are entering orders of magnitude traditionally associated with large national energy infrastructures, with projects whose investment amounts, connection needs and effects on the territories bring them closer to electricity networks or industrial complexes than to the data centers which have accompanied the rise of the cloud.
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