Orange and Morrison Plan EUR 3bn French Data Centre Venture
Orange is building a €3bn French data centre business, funded from New Zealand.
The 50/50 Joint Venture with Infrastructure Manager Morrison Targets 400MW
The venture targets 400 megawatts of capacity, close to ten times what Orange operates today.
July 27, 2026 – 8:23 pm
Image by: Bob Villars
Orange and Morrison announced an exclusivity agreement on Monday to create a jointly controlled data centre company in France, backed by a €3 billion investment programme combining Orange assets, Morrison equity, and debt. The venture targets 400 megawatts of capacity, close to ten times what Orange operates today.
Orange would contribute five French data centres to the vehicle. Morrison would supply the equity funding to scale the platform beyond that starting base.
Sovereignty Framing
Both companies pitched the deal as an effort to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty, describing it as a “sovereign offering” capable of serving fast-growing cloud and AI demand from Orange and Orange Business customers. The companies also noted that French electricity is among the least emission-intensive in Europe.
There is a wrinkle in that framing. Morrison is a New Zealand-based infrastructure asset manager, founded in 1988, whose portfolio includes Infratil, UK operator Kao Data, CDC Data Centres, and Vodafone New Zealand.
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Capacity as a Binding Constraint
Capacity is the binding constraint on European AI ambitions, and 400MW is a meaningful addition. Research has warned that Europe’s sovereign AI ambition risks stalling on data centre limits, with the EU’s Cloud and AI Development Act aiming to at least triple the bloc’s capacity within five to seven years.
Market Dynamics
The market Orange is entering is dominated by companies it is nominally positioning against. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together control around 70% of the European cloud market.
Sovereignty Debate
Whether new European capacity translates into genuine independence is contested. Critics have argued that GPU-as-a-service arrangements reinforce the illusion of European AI sovereignty, since the underlying silicon and much of the software stack remain American regardless of where the racks physically sit.