How will datacenters, strategic infrastructure for our future due to the development of AI, will integrate into the territories and companies in which they will be established?
The explosion of digital needs, accentuated by artificial intelligence, erects datacenters in strategic infrastructure for our future. Today they constitute the cornerstone of our digital lives, algorithms, innovation and the economy. But fundamental questions arise: how will these infrastructure integrate into the territories and societies in which they will be established?
In fact, the development of datacenters in Europe is essential to guarantee our digital sovereignty and the growth of our economy. But we cannot stick to it, only making it technical infrastructure, operating in the cloud, without any link with the territories where they are established, as much present as completely absent. This is why we call for our wishes a new generation of data centers: data centers fully inserted in their territories, in symbiosis with them, capable of having a real economic presence, capable of democracy around the sharing of electricity or water; acting for territorial cohesion. Technological infrastructure is part of the responsibility, not only ecological.
Adapt the infrastructure to the territories, not the reverse
We must favor concrete actions, project project, aimed at strengthening the integration of datacenters into the territories that welcome them, and confront the paradoxes they pose: for example the growth of our digital needs in the face of the environmental imprint of datacenters. The costing of their energy consumption and their impact on natural resources vary according to studies. ADEME, however, estimates that they represent around 46 % of the digital imprint in France, with increasing water consumption, although the latter remains marginal compared to the samples for the country’s current uses. How to reconcile these issues? It is no longer possible not to think together of the formidable progress of AI and the imperative response to climate change, currently each in their respective corridor, like two parallel worlds that ignore themselves.
Without having all the answers, the time has come to open the debate more broadly. The digital debate can no longer bear some of the black boxes that constitute it: ingenable algorithms, intraçable models, datacenters disconnected from their territories. In the darkness of industrial choices, without society, even against it, we will lose it.
Faced with the growing place of digital technology in our lives and the legitimate concerns of citizens located in location areas, it becomes imperative to initiate a real work of pedagogy and consultation with local communities, well upstream of projects. It is a question of clearly explaining the impacts of these to the inhabitants, of reassuring them on the measures taken to limit their effects, and above all to adapt the projects to the local specificities so that they integrate harmoniously into our society. Each territory has its own needs and constraints. Do not grasp it will generate tensions or rejection on the part of the populations concerned.
Use the demand for digital infrastructure as a lever for action for the territories
The solution lies in a quadripartite approach: planning, adaptation of projects to territories, integration … and democracy. Rather than being imposed on datacenters’ projects, the territories should have the possibility of defining their conditions and their needs, orient and complements developments according to their priorities.
Adapt the data center to the territory, not the other way around. This approach would allow local communities to surf the wave of datacenters rather than undergoing it, by mastering the development of these infrastructures to serve as an economic lever and to advance other local problems, such as the rehabilitation of brownfields, that is to say giving a new life to neglected sites while reducing the ecological imprint of new constructions. Datacenters can also act on the upgrading of infrastructure, support for energy transition, the development of local skills through training and job creation, heat supply, for example for public services or neighboring industries; or through partnerships with established industries, etc. This approach aims to ensure that datacenters assume a role of engines of innovation and local tangible, visible, appreciated.
By integrating additional activities, these digital infrastructure can thus participate in the development of a territorial identity, like what we have seen with shipyards in certain regions of northern France.
Infrastructure ignorant of its territory with a catalyst for innovation and local development, this is the challenge of “French” datacenters, a strategic issue for the digital future of Europe. The challenges are complex, but far from being insurmountable. By involving local actors and adapting projects to the realities of the field, we can make “surrounded” datacenters of the catalysts of projects useful to the territories: instead of undergoing this digital transformation, the latter can become the key players, ensuring that each project is an asset for the community.
Chronicle co-signed by
- Fabien Vieau, founder and CEO of sepia infrastructure
- François-Xavier Petit, Director General of Matrix
