Digital Realty has broken ground on PAR15, the first building in a much larger Paris data hub near Dugny that is set to become one of the company’s biggest footprints in the region. The site sits northeast of Paris on land that once belonged to the French air force and has reportedly stood empty since 2011.
The opening move is a 66 MW, three-storey data center with more than 23,000 square meters of server space. It is being built in four phases, with the first 12 MW due online in 2027. The wider Dugny Digital Hub will eventually reach 176 MW across three buildings, so the headline answer is already clear: Digital Realty is building a 176 MW Paris data hub in Dugny.
What Digital Realty is building in Dugny
Equans Data Centers, part of Bouygues, has been picked as general contractor and will handle design, construction, and commissioning. That matters because the tightest bottleneck in data center development is no longer just demand; it is execution, from power delivery to getting critical infrastructure built without delays.
- Site: Dugny, northeast of Paris
- First building: PAR15
- IT capacity: 66 MW
- Server area: more than 23,000 square meters
- Build plan: four phases
- First phase: 12 MW in 2027
The wider Dugny Digital Hub
PAR15 is only the beginning. Digital Realty says the full Dugny Digital Hub will eventually include three data centers – PAR15, PAR16, and PAR17 – with more than 65,000 square meters of combined floor space and 176 MW of total IT power. That is the sort of scale that turns a single project into regional infrastructure, and it helps explain why France keeps attracting hyperscale and colocation investment while older European hubs struggle to find enough ready-made capacity.
Digital Realty already runs a dozen data centers in the Paris region, which remains one of Europe’s main nodes for cloud infrastructure and internet traffic. The company is pitching the new campus as future-proofed for digital services and high-performance computing, which is another way of saying it wants room for workloads that are getting heavier, hotter and far less forgiving.
Paris keeps pulling in more cloud capacity
The buildout also reflects a broader European pattern: operators are racing to secure power and land around major cities before supply gets even tighter. Large campuses like this are expensive, slow and power-hungry, but they are becoming the only practical answer for AI, cloud and enterprise demand that keeps climbing faster than the region can add grid capacity.
The open question is how quickly the rest of the campus follows PAR15. If demand stays strong and permits, power and construction all stay aligned, Dugny could become one of Digital Realty’s most important French assets. If not, the first building may spend a while carrying the weight of a very ambitious master plan.