Interviewed by LeMagIT, Olivier Micheli notes that French data centers are finally attracting international cloud players and that they are expanding geographically in order to reduce latency.

Olivier Micheli, who is both CEO of Data4 Group and President of the France Datacenter Association, estimates that there are 200 large datacenters in France covering up to 10,000 m². The capital with the largest number of people because Paris is a European interconnection node.
There are between 3000 and 5000 private computer rooms of varying size and power across the country.
Beyond the desire of companies to control their equipment, the importance of ever lower latency is increasingly important in local economic activities and the development of smart cities.
According to Olivier Micheli, the market is moving towards data centres whose size is proportional to the size of the economic activity nearby.

After a slow period between 2012 and 2015, the French data center market has caught up. France is now in fourth place in Europe, tied with Ireland. There are several reasons for this: the opportunity for international companies to reach 67 million people from locally hosted IT resources, the geostrategic importance of Marseille and also the government's efforts to create favourable conditions for the development of these datacenters.
This finally allows France to align itself with the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands.

The customers of these data centers are 70% of public cloud players such as Amazon, AWS but also publishers such as Salesforce. User companies want a lot of support.

The first issue for datacenters is, according to Olivier Micheli, connectivity. Indeed, companies now want to benefit from an offshore computer room in order to redistribute this data to users and Internet actors.
The second challenge is that of intelligent buildings and to achieve 100% renewable energy by using, for example, Free Cooling.

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Source : LeMagIT