Summary
- Pau Béarn Pyrénées and La Fibre Paloise are building a €3m public local data centre due for completion in October 2027.
- The facility will offer scalable capacity up to 44 racks, a 450 sq m main building, PUE below 1.4, free cooling, high-efficiency UPS systems, and low annual water use.
- The project turns municipal digital sovereignty into physical infrastructure, with Axione handling operation and commercialisation through 2033.
Pau Béarn Pyrénées Agglomération and La Fibre Paloise are building a €3 million local public data centre near the city’s municipal technical centre, replacing an ageing IT room with a more resilient facility for local public services and regional digital users.
The project is scheduled for completion in October 2027 and is described by the authority as the first public proximity data centre in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Axione has been entrusted with operating and commercialising the infrastructure through 2033.
The existing municipal IT room at the Hôtel de France has capacity for 14 racks and has reached technical limits around resilience, ageing equipment, hosting capacity, and noise. The new facility will be built on a 1,485 sq m plot, with a 450 sq m main building, outdoor technical space, and scalable capacity up to 44 racks. Pau has published the technical and delivery details in its municipal project update.
Sovereignty becomes local plant
The Pau project is modest in power terms, but its role is specific. The facility is intended to host data and applications that the authority says cannot depend only on remote infrastructure, including administrative data, backups, supervision tools, digital services for local authorities, business applications, video protection systems, multi-service networks, and IoT platforms.
That gives the scheme a different shape from hyperscale or large colocation projects. The capacity is small, but the operating environment still needs physical security, data security, resilient power, fire detection and suppression, building management, cooling, maintenance, and connectivity. Local sovereignty does not reduce the engineering burden; it concentrates it into a site that public bodies and local partners can understand, access, and govern.
Pau’s fibre history also feeds into the case for the facility. The agglomeration created Pau Broadband Country in 2003 and developed one of Europe’s early fibre networks for businesses and residents. La Fibre Paloise now operates the public digital network through almost 200 service operators, with about 65,000 households and hundreds of businesses connected to very high-speed fibre.
The data centre adds hosting to that connectivity base. Instead of treating local digital infrastructure as ducts and fibre alone, the authority is adding the racks, cooling systems, UPS equipment, and secure building environment needed to keep services physically close to the territory.
Efficiency is written into the specification
The project’s environmental case is unusually detailed for a small municipal facility. Pau says the new data centre will have a PUE below 1.4. For 120kW of IT environment, the site would consume a maximum of 168kW, compared with 300kW for the old infrastructure, which is cited as having a PUE of 2.5.
The cooling design includes free cooling, allowing outside air to reduce compressor use when conditions permit. The facility will use high-efficiency UPS systems with performance between 95% and 99%, and chillers using R454B refrigerant, whose stated global warming potential is 466, compared with 2,088 for R410A. Hot-aisle containment will separate cold supply air at around 24°C from hot exhaust air captured at around 36°C.
Water is treated with the same precision. Pau says annual water use will be limited to about 3 cubic metres through a closed-loop system with occasional renewal of technical water volume. That detail is useful in a southern European context, where even small data centres can face sharper public scrutiny if cooling designs appear vague or water-intensive.
The construction sequence is already mapped: site installation in March 2026, foundations in April, pre-walls in June, enclosure in July, secondary trades from October, electrical network installation in December, chillers in March 2027, security and building management systems in April, fire detection and suppression in June, rack installation in July, testing and commissioning in September, and handover in October 2027.
Pau’s facility will not change France’s national data centre capacity picture. It does show how smaller cities are turning sovereignty, continuity, and local digital services into built infrastructure. The cloud may host the language of the debate, but in Pau the answer is a secure building with racks, cooling plant, UPS equipment, fire systems, access controls, and a delivery programme.
