Orange has agreed a new €3bn datacentre joint venture in France with infrastructure investor Morrison, creating a 50/50 partnership focused on expanding capacity. The move highlights Orange’s push to strengthen its domestic digital infrastructure as demand rises for cloud and AI services.
According to the available details, Orange will contribute five French facilities to the new company. The venture is intended to increase the telecom group’s current datacentre capacity by a factor of ten, giving it a much larger platform for future growth in France.
The strategy is tied to Orange’s wider ambition in sovereign AI and cloud, an area where companies and public-sector users are placing greater emphasis on local hosting and control over data. By building more capacity through a dedicated vehicle, Orange appears to be positioning itself for stronger demand from customers seeking French-based infrastructure.
For Morrison, the deal adds exposure to a large-scale digital infrastructure project in a market where datacentres have become increasingly important to telecom, cloud and AI development. For Orange, the partnership offers fresh investment and a faster route to scale without relying solely on its own balance sheet.
