Summary
- SEGRO’s Le Bourget proposal involves a data centre on a former H&M warehouse site north-east of Paris.
- Project material lists 75MVA of secured RTE power, a 3.5-hectare plot, and 33,400m² of buildable area.
- Environmental authority and public-consultation documents have raised questions around heat recovery, air quality, refrigerants, backup generation, and local impact.
SEGRO’s proposed data centre at Le Bourget, north-east of Paris, is facing renewed political pressure after the municipality’s mayor moved to oppose the scheme.
The project concerns a former H&M warehouse site at 45/45 bis rue du Commandant Rolland, where SEGRO Bourget has sought environmental authorisation and a building permit for a data centre development. Public consultation material describes a secured physical facility with IT rooms, offices, technical areas, an electrical substation, a generator building, and a heat recovery building.
SEGRO’s earlier project teaser described the site as a 3.5-hectare built-to-suit opportunity in the northern Paris data centre cluster, with 75MVA of RTE power secured through a double feed, 33,400m² of buildable area, and zoning that allows data centre use.
The project now sits inside a familiar European collision: dense urban data centre demand, constrained power, local environmental scrutiny, and a planning system being asked to judge infrastructure that looks more like a utility asset than a warehouse redevelopment.
Permitting pressure in the Paris cluster
The public enquiry for the SEGRO Bourget project ran in 2025, and the Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture later published supporting documents, consultation material, reports, and conclusions. The consultation register describes the project as including emergency generators for electricity supply interruptions and maintenance testing, along with equipment intended to recover heat from the data centre.
France’s regional environmental authority for Île-de-France examined the project and asked for further clarity across several areas. Its published opinion called for more information on the wider project perimeter, including electrical connection, heat network connection, and data network works. It also recommended fuller carbon accounting, additional air-quality modelling, noise analysis, and more detailed treatment of risks linked to lithium-ion batteries and other technical systems.
Heat recovery is one of the most politically exposed parts of the scheme. Data centres increasingly rely on heat reuse to strengthen their planning case, but theoretical waste heat becomes useful heat only when there is nearby demand, a suitable network, and enforceable offtake. Environmental scrutiny of the Le Bourget project has focused in part on whether the planned level of residual heat recovery has been properly justified.
Air quality and backup generation carry similar weight. Large data centres typically rely on multiple generators for resilience, even if they operate infrequently. In dense urban areas, the concern is not only annual emissions, but the local effect of generator operation during grid failure, testing, or wider emergency conditions when other infrastructure may also be running backup plant.
The urban data centre bargain
The Le Bourget site sits close to the established Paris data centre market. That gives it commercial and network logic: proximity to fibre routes, customers, operators, and interconnection points still matters, particularly for latency-sensitive and enterprise workloads.
That same proximity raises the local bar. Councils and residents are asking how much power a site will draw, what heat will be reused, how backup systems will affect air quality, how refrigerants and batteries are managed, and whether the local benefits match the physical burden.
France is not alone. Similar questions are emerging around Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Madrid. Paris brings its own intensity because urban and peri-urban projects can sit close to homes, schools, transport corridors, logistics facilities, and other industrial uses, while regional power and planning systems are already under pressure.
The Le Bourget proposal also shows the risks of shifting logistics real estate into data centre development. Warehouses and data centres both use large industrial plots, but the utility profile, risk assessment, and public-interest test are different. A warehouse conversion may look like efficient land reuse; a 75MVA data centre remains a major electrical and resilience asset.
If mayoral opposition alters the project’s path, Le Bourget could become a reference point for how French municipalities treat data centres in established urban clusters. If the scheme proceeds, tougher conditions around environmental monitoring, heat recovery, backup generation, and public transparency are likely to follow.
The Paris region still needs digital infrastructure capacity. At Le Bourget, the question is whether that capacity can be inserted into a dense urban fabric without turning power, air, heat, and public trust into the next bottlenecks.
