Summary

• Orange and Morrison have entered exclusivity talks to create a 50:50 datacentre joint venture in France.
• The planned platform targets 400MW of capacity, supported by a €3 billion investment programme.
• The proposal shows telecoms assets, infrastructure capital, energy availability, and AI demand converging around European compute capacity.

Orange and infrastructure investor Morrison have entered exclusivity talks to create a jointly controlled datacentre company in France, targeting 400MW of capacity and backed by a €3 billion investment programme.

The proposed 50:50 joint venture would build on Orange’s existing French datacentre estate, with five major facilities across four campuses in Chevilly-Larue, Aubervilliers, Chartres, and Val-de-Reuil. Orange says the platform would support cloud services, artificial intelligence, and large scale data processing, while strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty.

If completed, the venture would increase Orange’s French datacentre capacity to nearly ten times its current level. Orange Business is expected to act as the exclusive partner for colocation and hosting offers to large enterprises, SMEs, and public sector entities, while Orange would retain operational control over areas dedicated to its own systems and services.

The planned joint venture sits inside a wider European scramble for AI era infrastructure. Datacentres have moved from back office property to strategic assets because AI workloads need power, cooling, chips, network access, physical security, and credible jurisdictional control. In regulated markets, the site itself has become part of the trust proposition.

Christel Heydemann, Chief Executive Officer of Orange Group, said France would need “sovereign, trusted digital infrastructure” to meet demand driven by cloud and artificial intelligence. The quote is also a useful description of Orange’s commercial problem. Telecoms operators own networks, sites, customer relationships, and national infrastructure expertise, but hyperscale cloud providers and specialist datacentre operators have captured much of the growth created by enterprise cloud adoption.

By bringing in Morrison, Orange can pair existing assets with infrastructure capital rather than trying to fund every step of capacity expansion from its own balance sheet. Morrison says it manages more than US$30 billion of assets, while Orange contributes sites, operational expertise, enterprise customer routes, and a strategic need for trusted hosting capacity.

France gives the plan several advantages. The country has a comparatively low carbon electricity mix, a large domestic enterprise and public sector market, and a policy environment that has treated digital sovereignty as a strategic objective. As more organisations run AI inference close to business processes, fine tune models on sensitive data, or build cloud services around regulated workloads, hosting location becomes a commercial feature rather than a final line in a procurement checklist.

The sovereignty claim still needs careful handling. A French datacentre does not automatically create a sovereign technology stack. Customers will still need to understand who operates the cloud layer, who controls encryption keys, what software supply chain is used, how support access works, what contractual restrictions apply, and which legal regimes can reach the data or the provider. Physical infrastructure is necessary for sovereignty, but it does not complete the job on its own.

Capacity, however, is a real constraint. Enterprises cannot deploy AI workloads on policy ambition or procurement language. They need data halls, energy contracts, cooling capacity, fibre, resilient operations, hardware availability, security controls, and commercial terms that allow projects to scale. Public bodies need the same foundations, with more scrutiny over accountability, jurisdiction, and procurement transparency.

The environmental test will follow the venture closely. Large datacentre expansion places pressure on grids, local planning processes, water use, heat reuse, and public acceptance. Orange says the platform would benefit from some of Europe’s most decarbonised electricity and aim for high standards of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Those claims will have to stand up as projects move from exclusivity talks to site expansion, power allocation, and operational reporting.

The transaction is expected to be signed by the end of 2026, subject to consultation with employee representative bodies and regulatory approvals, with closing expected in the first quarter of 2027. If it goes ahead, the venture will be a marker for how European telecoms groups, infrastructure funds, and enterprise technology demand are being reorganised around AI capacity.