Data centers and the energy behind AI: what France's 2027 presidential candidates propose
Siting, electricity and nuclear power, water, taxation, sovereign hosting and moratoriums: the physical infrastructure of AI.
As of October 14, 2026, 73 proposals and statements on this theme are available in English, from 19 candidates and potential candidates.
Background
According to RTE, around 300 data centers are located in France in 2026. Their electricity consumption is estimated at around 10 TWh, or about 2% of annual electricity consumption. RTE forecasts between 15 and 20 TWh in 2030, then between 23 and 28 TWh in 2035. In May 2026, RTE had reserved nearly 18 GW of connection capacity for about 80 projects. The Choose France 2026 summit recorded 93 billion euros in investment pledges, mostly in digital technology. According to Arcep, cited by Next, data centers consumed 575,000 m³ of water in 2024.
On March 25, 2026, the Senate adopted a bill to regulate the siting of data centers, which was forwarded to the National Assembly. In July 2026, the Assembly's commission of inquiry into digital dependencies proposed a moratorium on projects that do not meet a sovereignty imperative.
Sources: RTE · Next · Banque des Territoires (Localtis) · Silicon.fr
Candidate by candidate
Gabriel Attal3 items
Delphine Batho1 item
Xavier Bertrand1 item
Juan Branco1 item
Emmanuel Dubuisson1 item
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan6 items
- Impose reversibility clauses to recover data stored on non-sovereign servers
- Deploy a sovereign cloud independent of Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure
- Using Data Center Heat for District Heating
- Exit the European GAIA-X project in favor of national projects led by INRIA
- Require French users' data to be hosted in France
- Having mega data-processing and hosting centers that produce heat
David Lisnard1 item
Emmanuel Maurel2 items
Antoine Mikolajczak1 item
Jean-Luc Mélenchon9 items
- Moratorium on data centers intended for foreign companies subject to U.S. law
- Question on a moratorium on data center projects and a slowdown in the development of AI
- The candidate says data centers raise an ecological question
- Ban any foreign dependency in the State's critical digital sectors
- Mobilizing national savings to finance sovereign computing centers and a public cloud
- Mention of SoftBank's announced investments in AI infrastructure and data centers in France
- Observation on the electricity, water, land and public resource needs of AI infrastructure
- Criticism of government announcements on data centers and AI infrastructure funded by foreign groups
- Criticism of data center development on farmland and of rising electricity consumption
Édouard Philippe1 item
Florian Philippot1 item
Bruno Retailleau10 items
- Raising sovereign computing capacity to around 1 GW by 2030, then toward 4 GW in 2035-2038
- Financing data centers mainly through private capital, with the State acting on land and grid connection
- Reducing the electricity connection time to eighteen months, via a single point of contact
- Organizing sovereign computing capacity in three circles: sovereign functions, French industry, European
- Host sovereign and critical AI applications on SecNumCloud-type offerings
- Excluding from core sovereign functions the clouds operated in France under license from a non-European hyperscaler
- Have BPI and the Caisse des dépôts co-invest in sovereign cloud operators
- Mobilizing public land near nuclear plants and on brownfield sites for data centers
- Systematize waste heat recovery from data centers above a threshold
- Focus RTE and Enedis investments on grid connections, including those for data centers
François Ruffin17 items
- Require an independent counter-assessment, funded by the project developer, before any vote by elected officials on a data center
- Eliminating the reduced electricity tax rate for non-strategic data centers
- Placing non-strategic data centers behind fundamental needs and industry in grid connections
- Financing data centers located in France with European capital
- Making SecNumCloud qualification mandatory and strengthening it for state data and vital sectors
- No farmland or natural land to be developed for a data center as long as a suitable brownfield site exists
- Eliminate the major national interest project status for data centers
- Requiring non-critical tasks, including AI model training, to be paused during consumption peaks
- Make referral to the Commission nationale du débat public mandatory from the first act of a major project
- Consult residents of affected municipalities before any final decision on a data center
- Require every data center project to be declared in a single ICPE application
- Reserving a fixed share of electricity for digital technology, decided by a citizens' assembly chosen by lot
- Give the host municipality binding approval or a suspensive veto over very large data centers
- Introduce a five-year moratorium on non-sovereign data center projects
- Cap data centers' electricity consumption and require heat recovery
- Criticism of the use of farmland to build data centers for American digital groups
- Better regulating the establishment of data centers to reduce soil artificialization
Marine Tondelier8 items
- Raising the digital services tax to 5% and extending it to data center operators
- Bringing data centers back within the scope of the Commission nationale du débat public
- Identifying drinking water and soil artificialization issues linked to data centers
- Planning data centers' electricity consumption at the national and territorial levels
- Eliminate the possibility of labeling data centers as a "major national interest project"
- Develop research on cooling and optimizing data center energy consumption
- Setting maximum thresholds conditioning building permits for data centers
- Host sensitive data in data centers located in France owned by European players