Summary
- Maury Imprimeur has sold a 65,000 sq m former industrial printing site in Le Malesherbois to Garbe Industrial Real Estate.
- The site is intended for conversion into a data centre or logistics-type asset after comprehensive modernisation.
- The project remains a brownfield watch item because grid connection authorisation has not yet been confirmed.
Garbe Industrial Real Estate has acquired a former Maury Imprimeur industrial printing site in Le Malesherbois, France, for potential conversion into a data centre.
The site covers almost 65,000 sq m in the Loiret department, on the edge of the Île-de-France region. Osborne Clarke, which advised Maury Imprimeur on the disposal, said the property is intended to be converted into a data centre and will undergo comprehensive modernisation to reposition it for logistics-type use with higher environmental standards.
The transaction note describes a brownfield asset with environmental-law complexity, reflecting the site’s history of industrial activities subject to France’s ICPE regime for installations classified for environmental protection.
The scheme is not yet a committed data centre development. Local reporting indicates that the plan depends on Enedis authorising a grid connection, and no target IT load, customer, design standard, or construction timetable has been confirmed.
Brownfield opportunity, grid dependency
The Malesherbois site has several characteristics that fit Europe’s current data centre land hunt. It is large, industrial, already developed, and located within reach of major road corridors including the A6, A19, A10, and A11. Those features make it potentially attractive for reuse when large greenfield schemes are facing closer political and environmental scrutiny.
Brownfield reuse can reduce some planning friction, although it rarely makes delivery simple. Former industrial sites can bring legacy contamination, complex permitting, remediation cost, demolition work, and environmental diligence. For a data centre, those issues sit alongside the need for heavy electrical infrastructure, cooling plant, backup power, security, fibre routes, and long-term operational access.
The unresolved grid connection remains the defining constraint. Data centre projects can secure land and still remain speculative if the electricity network cannot support the load at the required capacity, timeframe, and resilience level. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, operators are competing for sites that combine land with credible transmission or distribution access.
The absence of disclosed IT capacity is therefore important. A former printworks may be physically large enough for data centre use, but the eventual scale will be determined by power, planning, building conversion economics, and customer demand. A logistics/data centre repositioning strategy also leaves open the possibility of mixed-use or phased redevelopment if the electrical route proves difficult.
France’s conversion pipeline broadens
The Malesherbois transaction follows a wider French push to reuse industrial land for digital infrastructure. Major operators and investors have been drawn to former manufacturing, telecoms, and power-related sites because they can offer scale, existing infrastructure corridors, and a stronger regeneration argument than undeveloped rural land.
France’s AI infrastructure pitch is increasingly tied to power availability, sovereign cloud capacity, and industrial policy. Delivery, however, depends on local conditions: which sites can be energised, cooled, permitted, and connected without years of delay. Malesherbois shows the market moving beyond headline campus announcements into the more difficult terrain of property conversion.
For Garbe, the site may become part of a wider European digital infrastructure strategy. The German industrial property group has been linked with data centre development elsewhere in Europe, and brownfield industrial assets are becoming more valuable as powered land becomes scarce.
The next milestone is electrical rather than architectural. Until the grid position is confirmed, Le Malesherbois remains a credible redevelopment candidate rather than a bankable data centre project. That distinction is becoming increasingly important as the European market fills with proposals that depend on network capacity still being negotiated.
