Scaleway — AION 'AI Gigafactory'

The AION project, announced by Scaleway and the Iliad Group in June 2025, is a 200 MW AI compute campus under development at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, southeast of Paris on the confluence of the Seine and Yonne rivers. The site occupies the grounds of a former coal thermal power station — repurposing industrial infrastructure that once generated electricity from fossil fuels into infrastructure that will consume electricity for AI compute.

Iliad Group is France’s most important independent telecommunications and cloud conglomerate, founded by billionaire Xavier Niel and operating the Free and Free Mobile telecom brands alongside the Scaleway cloud platform. AION is Iliad/Scaleway’s most ambitious infrastructure project and their response to France’s national AI sovereignty imperative under President Macron’s “AI Made in France” initiative. With 200 MW of capacity targeting GPU clusters equivalent to over 288,000 NVIDIA H100 GPU-equivalents, AION positions as one of the few European facilities capable of hosting frontier model training runs at scale — a critical gap in Europe’s AI infrastructure where most large-scale training still relies on US hyperscaler capacity.

The Montereau site was selected for several infrastructure advantages. The former power plant has an existing high-voltage electrical substation and grid connection rated for hundreds of megawatts — avoiding the lengthy grid connection permitting process that delays most new data center projects in France and Germany. The Seine-Yonne confluence provides abundant water access for cooling infrastructure. The site’s southeast-of-Paris location is within 80 km of the capital, enabling low-latency connectivity to Paris internet exchanges (Equinix PA8 and the Telehouse campus at Voltaire) while remaining outside Paris’s saturated real estate market.

AION is explicitly designed as a sovereign AI alternative to US hyperscaler GPU capacity. French enterprises and government agencies seeking to train AI models on data that cannot leave French jurisdiction currently have limited options at scale: Scaleway’s DC5 in Cergy (20 MW GPU capacity) or expensive hyperscaler solutions with potential CLOUD Act exposure. AION’s 200 MW fills this gap — designed to host multi-month frontier model training runs for French research institutions (CEA, Inria, CNRS), defense AI applications, and large enterprises in finance, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace with data sovereignty requirements.

Capacity: 200 MW target · Site: Former coal thermal power plant (Montereau-Fault-Yonne) · Timeline: Announced June 2025, under development · Operator: Scaleway (Iliad Group)