Aether Infrastructures signs preliminary deal for Strasbourg data center site

Aether Infrastructures has signed a preliminary sale agreement to buy the 90-hectare Dumarey Powerglide site in Strasbourg's Port du Rhin district for its first data center, Data Center Dynamics reported. A lease signed alongside the agreement will let preliminary work start on the complex, to be named FR-SXB1. The site formerly housed a factory that made gearboxes for vehicles; Dumarey earmarked it for closure in January, with 320 jobs lost.

Partners in the consortium include hardware firms SiPearl and 2CRSi, real estate company Nhood and Dassault Systèmes. DCD reported in July that Aether was formed to build two data centers under the European Commission's AI gigafactories program. This publication reported in September that a public programme is paying for SiPearl's first chip order.

FR-SXB1 has 25MW of grid power available. Aether is investigating other energy sources, including a biomass plant that would generate electricity and produce biochar, which captures carbon and can be used as a soil enhancer by farmers and gardeners.

Across both sites Aether expects 42MW available, and FR-SXB1's 25MW leaves 17MW implied for FR-SXB2. The consortium hopes to close the purchase of that second campus by the end of the year.

This publication reported in August that Schwarz's €5.6bn campus in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a 240MW project; Aether's two sites together expect 42MW.

2CRSi will run an on-site industrial facility to design, assemble, integrate, test and qualify data center modules. Those prefabricated modules will be deployed on the site and marketed to third-party customers. Aether believes the site can eventually become Europe's largest industrial site dedicated to artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Aether is hoping for funding from the EU's €20bn ($22.8bn) gigafactories project, announced in February 2025. That programme envisions three to five large supercomputing campuses built across the continent, each equipped with 100,000 AI chips for training the most complex models. Other candidates include a French consortium led by Iliad and Dutch company Volt. Aether has previously stated a 2027 opening target for the data center.