Data4 is leading a €5 billion ($5.86bn) project to develop a data center campus at a former steelworks in Northern France.

The company has been selected to deliver the campus at the Soufflantes industrial park in Escaudain, near Denain, which is just outside the city of Valenciennes.

It was formerly owned by steel company Usinor, which operated a plant on the site, but operations there ceased 45 years ago.

More recently, the land was identified by the French government as one of 35 turnkey sites available for the development of data centers in France.

It has up to 700MW of power available via the RTE network, though the expected capacity of the data center has not been disclosed.

A consortium comprising Brookfield-owned Data4 and construction firm BT Immo was selected to deliver the project following a local authority meeting on Monday. A feasibility study will now be carried out to determine if the data center can be built. This is likely to take two months, and it is anticipated the data center will be up and running by 2030 if the project goes ahead.

La Voix du Nord reports that AWS was interested in developing the site, but lost out to the Data4 bid.

Data4 was established back in 2006 by Colony Capital (now DigitalBridge) and has been owned by Brookfield since April 2023. The company currently operates more than 30 data centers in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany, and Greece, totaling around 1.5GW.

Earlier this year, Brookfield announced it was investing €20 billion ($20.7bn) in French digital infrastructure over the next five years, most of which will be funnelled through Data4. The company is developing a hyperscale campus near Denain, on a former air force base at Cambrai.