IN Brief:
- Digital Realty has started work on PAR15, the first building at its planned Dugny Digital Hub near Paris.
- The three-storey facility is expected to provide 66MW across 23,320 sq m of IT space.
- The wider campus will include three data centres, reflecting Europe’s growing demand for AI, cloud, and sovereign digital infrastructure.
Digital Realty has started work on PAR15, the first data centre building at its planned Dugny Digital Hub north of Paris.
Equans Data Centers has been appointed as strategic general contractor for the design, construction, and commissioning of the facility. PAR15 is planned as a three-storey colocation data centre offering 66MW across 23,320 sq m of IT space, with delivery structured in phases.
The first phase is expected to provide 12MW and is scheduled for delivery in 2027. At full build-out, the wider Dugny Digital Hub is planned to include three data centres — PAR15, PAR16, and PAR17 — providing more than 65,000 sq m of IT space and 176MW of IT capacity.
The campus is being developed on a former French Air Force site in Dugny, north-east of Paris. Digital Realty has positioned the project around AI infrastructure, sovereign cloud hosting, and long-term digital capacity in France, with the site close to existing facilities in La Courneuve and established connectivity infrastructure in northern Paris.
Data centres remain among the most technically demanding building types in the European construction pipeline. Their delivery combines large-scale structural works with high-density power systems, specialist cooling, fire strategy, physical security, backup generation, fibre connectivity, and rigorous commissioning.
Equans brings established mission-critical experience to the package. The company has cited previous delivery of 340,000 sq m of data hall space and more than 790MW of IT capacity, placing the Dugny appointment within a market where specialist contractor capacity is becoming a procurement constraint in its own right.
Demand across Europe is being driven by cloud computing, AI workloads, enterprise digitalisation, and data sovereignty requirements. Those pressures are increasing competition for sites with power availability, fibre connectivity, planning support, and sufficient land for phased growth. At the same time, grid constraints, heat management, water use, embodied carbon, and local community impact are becoming harder to separate from core design decisions.
Digital Realty has said the Dugny campus will target certification standards including LEED, with a framework covering energy efficiency, carbon reduction, biodiversity, local hiring, inclusion, low-carbon construction, circularity, and lifecycle analysis. Those targets will need to sit alongside the operational realities of a high-power, high-resilience asset.
The Paris project has clear parallels with UK data centre activity. A 15MW Redhill data centre that cleared planning in Surrey was also shaped by power, heat reuse, cooling, and specialist M&E delivery. PAR15 is larger and sits in a different market, but both schemes show how data centre construction now depends as heavily on energy strategy and commissioning discipline as on the building envelope.
Dugny also sits within a wider Grand Paris construction landscape that includes major knowledge, healthcare, university, and digital infrastructure schemes. Eiffage’s work on the Grand Paris Nord university hub adds another technically complex project in the region, where public infrastructure, specialist buildings, and digital capacity are being expanded in parallel.
For contractors, data centres offer substantial workload but limited tolerance for weak coordination. Programme delays are costly, commissioning is unforgiving, and supply chains for electrical equipment, cooling systems, switchgear, and generators remain stretched across Europe. Late design changes can affect power density, M&E layouts, resilience strategy, and customer fit-out.
PAR15 will test integrated delivery across construction, power, cooling, controls, software, and commissioning. The project is not simply a large building; it is a phased digital infrastructure asset where construction quality and operational readiness have to arrive together.