Summary

• Orange and Morrison plan a jointly owned French datacentre company targeting 400MW.
• The proposed €3 billion programme combines telecoms assets, infrastructure capital, and debt.
• Power, planning, construction, utilisation, and the practical limits of sovereignty claims will determine its commercial value.

Orange is preparing to move a substantial part of its French datacentre estate into a jointly owned infrastructure platform, bringing outside capital into a market where cloud and artificial intelligence workloads require more power, space, and specialist construction.

The Orange group and infrastructure investor Morrison have entered an exclusivity agreement to establish a 50:50 venture targeting 400MW of capacity in France. A proposed €3 billion investment programme would draw on Orange assets, Morrison equity, and debt financing.

Orange intends to contribute five major datacentres across campuses at Chevilly-Larue, Aubervilliers, Chartres, and Val-de-Reuil. The target is close to ten times the company’s current capacity, placing the proposed business among Europe’s larger attempts to convert existing telecoms infrastructure into an AI and cloud hosting platform.

The companies expect to sign the transaction by the end of 2026, following employee consultation and regulatory approval, with completion planned for the first quarter of 2027. Until those stages are complete, the venture remains a proposed transaction rather than an operating company with committed construction dates.

Telecoms assets suit the infrastructure market

Datacentre development rewards capabilities that traditional telecoms operators already possess because they control network connections, secure sites, operational teams, enterprise relationships, and experience maintaining critical systems. The capital required to build AI-ready facilities, however, can sit awkwardly on balance sheets already carrying expensive mobile and fixed network programmes.

A jointly owned platform would allow Orange to retain strategic influence while sharing the financing burden. The venture is expected to be accounted for using the equity method, moving the operation outside full line-by-line consolidation while preserving Orange’s participation in any future value growth.

Morrison manages more than $30 billion of assets and brings an infrastructure finance model suited to a long construction programme. External equity and debt may accelerate development, although the money will carry return requirements that depend on sustained demand, effective pricing, and high utilisation.

Orange Business is expected to become the exclusive distributor of the venture’s colocation and hosting offers to large companies, smaller businesses, and public sector customers. That arrangement would keep Orange’s connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, and hosting services commercially linked while giving the datacentre company an established route into European accounts.

Existing customers and operational capability provide a stronger starting position than a greenfield developer would enjoy. Even so, expanding capacity nearly tenfold requires more than transferring assets into a new corporate structure.

Sovereignty extends beyond the building

The partners describe the platform as an addition to Europe’s sovereign digital infrastructure. Facilities located and operated in France can address requirements involving jurisdiction, resilience, and proximity, yet physical location alone does not settle whether a service is sovereign.

Customers will also examine ownership, operational control, legal exposure, encryption key management, software dependencies, hardware supply chains, and the organisations able to access or administer systems. A French building hosting infrastructure operated by a non-European cloud provider may satisfy some residency requirements while leaving wider technology dependencies unchanged.

Orange says it will retain operational control over areas dedicated to its own systems, while the venture would support Orange Business services and outside customers. That division will need clear governance where public authorities or regulated organisations purchase hosting on the strength of security and sovereignty claims.

France nevertheless offers an advantage that many European markets cannot reproduce easily through its comparatively low-carbon electricity system and large nuclear fleet. Datacentre operators now assess both power availability and carbon intensity as AI clusters raise electricity demand and customers attempt to reconcile computing growth with climate commitments.

Local electricity does not remove all environmental pressure. Construction materials, water use, backup generation, grid reinforcement, and the embodied carbon of computing hardware will remain part of the platform’s footprint, while greater efficiency can be overtaken by rapidly rising demand.

Finance cannot create 400MW on its own

Europe’s datacentre market is constrained by more than access to capital because grid connections, transformers, cooling equipment, skilled labour, land, planning consent, and community acceptance can delay projects after investment has been secured.

Operators must also decide how much capacity to build before customers commit. AI systems may require very high rack densities and liquid cooling, whereas conventional cloud and enterprise workloads arrive with different technical needs. Flexible campuses cost more to design, but facilities optimised too narrowly for the current generation of accelerators may age quickly.

Orange’s existing estate can reduce some execution risk by providing sites, connections, staff, and customer relationships. However, the final economics will depend on how much usable power is secured, when each phase opens, and whether customers sign contracts at prices capable of covering energy, financing, maintenance, and continuing upgrades.

The proposal also continues a wider restructuring of European digital infrastructure. Telecoms companies have separated towers, fibre, datacentres, and other capital-intensive assets into ventures that can attract specialist investors, while retaining commercial access to the resulting platforms.

AI demand gives that model another growth narrative, although the business remains rooted in physical infrastructure. Signing and closing the venture will provide the first milestones; the more revealing figures will concern contracted capacity, grid access, construction progress, and the premium customers are prepared to pay for a French controlled platform.