Since the end of 2023, the Marseille collective Le Nuage était sous nos pieds (The cloud was beneath our feet) has been investigating, analysing and fighting against the social, ecological and political impacts of digital infrastructures in Marseilles, in particular international undersea cables and data centres. The collective is made up of Marseille residents affiliated to at least three organisations: the collectif des Gammares a Marseille collective for popular education on water issues, Technopolice Marseille which analyses and fights against police surveillance technologies, and La Quadrature du Net, an association for the defence of fundamental freedoms and rights in the digital environment. In this article, we present part of the collective’s investigation into digital infrastructures in Marseille, their socio-environmental impact and the noxious world they represent, an investigation that we are extending beyond the Marseilles area, inspired in particular by the debates at the Le nuage était sous nos pieds festival that took place on 8, 9 and 10 November 2024 in Marseille.
Some sixteen intercontinental submarine cables arrive in Marseille today, landing, transiting and linking Europe and the Mediterranean to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the United States. It is these intercontinental cables that enable digital information to circulate, particularly on the Internet, and the digital services deployed in what is known as the ‘cloud’ to appear on our screens: emails, social networks, streaming videos and films. At the crossroads of these ‘information superhighways’ are the data centres. These concrete overheating mega-computers contain thousands of servers that make technocapitalism and its invisible digital data possible: the massive collection of personal data used to analyse our behaviour, which is constantly tracked and processed for marketing purposes; digital advertising that pollutes our brains; police video surveillance and, more broadly, algorithmic governance and surveillance boosted by artificial intelligence that discriminates against and undermines our fundamental freedoms. Behind these infrastructures, there is also the grabbing of land and water resources, but also air pollution, the concreting of our heated cities, and the blood-stained realities of colonial digital extractivism that the server chips that populate these data centres contain. And once again, it is unscrupulous industries, aided and abetted by shameful policies, that are taking over our territories and our lives.
Data centres and transcontinental submarine cables
Map of transcontinental submarine cables arriving in Marseille today. Source: Telegeography, Submarine Cable Map.
The presence of these 16 intercontinental submarine cables in Marseille attracts data centres, these giant warehouses where thousands of servers are stacked, belonging for the most part to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Disney+, Capgemini, Thalès, etc. Servers that store and transmit data, servers that make possible the digital services and data exchanges described above. Over the past ten years, and more rapidly since 2020, a dozen data centres have been built all over the inner city of Marseille, and several new ones are under construction or planned in and around the city. These include five data centres owned by Digital Realty, an American real estate investment giant listed on the stock exchange and specialising in the management of so-called network-neutral, carrier-neutral or colocation data centres. The presence of these 16 intercontinental submarine cables in Marseille attracts data centres, these giant warehouses where thousands of servers are stacked, belonging for the most part to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Disney+, Capgemini, Thalès, etc. Servers that store and transmit data, servers that make possible the digital services and data exchanges described above. Over the past ten years, and more rapidly since 2020, a dozen data centres have been built all over the inner city of Marseille, and several new ones are under construction or planned in and around the city. These include five data centres owned by Digital Realty, an American real estate investment trust listed on the stock exchange and specialising in the management of so-callednetwork-neutral, carrier-neutral or colocation data centres. This company builds, fits out and manages the building’s operations, and then rents out the server locations to other companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Netflix and others. These colocation data centres are well established in France, but in other countries and territories, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other digital giants build their own data centre buildings and all the infrastructure they need to operate them: electrical substations, terrestrial fibre networks, transcontinental submarine cables, etc.
In Marseilles, the giant Digital Realty, one of the world’s three leading colocation data centres, has four data centres, MRS1, MRS2, MRS3 and MRS4, and is in the process of building a fifth, MRS5, all located within the Grand Port Maritime de Marseille (GPMM). The other data centres in Marseille are often located in the north of the city. In the Saint-Henri district in particular, where a Free Pro colocation data centre is currently being expanded to double its size, sharing space with a Telehouse data centre. In the Saint-André district, an oversized data centre project by Segro has just been announced. While at Belle-de-Mai a data centre by Phocea DC is under construction. There’s even a project for a floating data centre in the Grand Port, by the company Nautilus! Outside the municipal boundaries, in Bouc-Bel-Air, Digital Realty also has a project to build a sixth data centre, much larger than the previous ones, called MRS6.
View of Digital Realty’s MRS2, MRS3 and MRS4 data centres in Marseille’s Grand Port Maritime, from Cap Janet in the Calade district. Photo taken during the Le nuage était sous nos pieds festival walk, 9 November 2024.
Marseille is not the only city concerned. France, with its 300-plus data centers, is now the world’s 6th largest host country, after the USA, Germany, the UK, China and Canada. In the Île-de-France region, France’s leading location with 95 data centers, just ahead of Lyon (18) and Marseille (12), Digital Realty has 2 hubs with a total of 17 data centers (and several more under construction), mostly concentrated in Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix, another giant in the world’s top 3 colocation data centers, owns 10, while Data4, Scaleway or Free Pro, OVH, Telehouse, Verizon, Zayo and other players share the remaining 72.
Map of data centers in the Île-de-France region, visible on OpenStreetMap, using the Overpass query https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Ulj.
The sixteen intercontinental submarine cables arriving in Marseilles today are listed by Telegeography, an entity that maintains Submarine Cable Map, one of the world’s reference maps for this type of cable. They are built and deployed within international consortia comprising several digital companies and multinationals. First and foremost are the digital giants – Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – who are now the biggest financiers and the main players in the deployment of these intercontinental submarine cables. They also include telecoms companies such as Orange, as well as international operators, who will often be in charge of landing the cables on beaches, as well as cable landing stations or centers, enabling the transition between the submarine infrastructures and the terrestrial cable network. There are also companies that manufacture and deploy these cables at sea, such as Alcatel Submarine Networks, which has just been acquired by the French government and is one of the three world leaders in this field, along with TE SubCom (Switzerland) and NEC Corporation (Japan).
Map of transcontinental submarine cables in Marseille. Source: Telegeography Submarine Cable Map 2024.
The digital giants’ stranglehold
These submarine cables and their landing centers are now strategic infrastructures, with major geopolitical stakes worldwide, but where the domination of digital giants is also becoming the norm. In Marseilles, for example, most of the new submarine cables built or under construction in recent years have as their main player Facebook (2Africa), Google (Blue), and Microsoft (SeaMeWe-6). Among the telecoms operators and Internet service providers from all over the world that the presence of intercontinental submarine cables also attracts to Marseille is the French multinational Orange, which has at least one data center in the city for its own needs, as well as several submarine cable landing centers.cable landing stations. We also have the presence of Verizon, an American telecom operator with a data center coupled to a submarine cable landing center, and Omantel, Oman’s national telecom company, which also has one – to name just a few of the operators identified by the survey and mapping of digital infrastructures in Marseille carried out by the Le Nuage était sous nos pieds collective. You can find out more about this mapping work carried out in the field, and using on the free, collaborative map OpenStreetMap, on this map created during this investigation.
Map of digital infrastructures in Marseille. Mapping work based on OpenStreetMap and field observations from the Le nuage était sous nos pieds collective.
Marseille also boasts a significant number of Internet eXchange Points (IXP), physical infrastructures where telecom operators, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and companies offering digital services connect and exchange cost-free traffic through mutual agreements. So, as Stéphane Bortzmeyer explains in
There are at least 6 IXP points of presence in Marseille today, as can be seen from this freely accessible European database. The Marseilles IXPs all appear to be located in Digital Realty data centers, and for each of them (Points of Presence tab) you can see the list of digital players connected there: TikTok, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Disney+, Netflix, Zoom, the list of the usual giants goes on and on. The proximity of these IXPs to the transcontinental submarine cables in Marseille ensures optimal latency and bandwidth, while their presence within the data centers themselves, as close as possible to the digital services that exploit the space there, is also an additional marketing argument for Digital Realty. On a national level, Paris, with its dozen IXPs, is, along with Marseille, the area where most IXPs are located, ahead of other major metropolises. The locations and specific features of IXPs worldwide can also be found on this map maintained by Telegeography.
Photo of a Beach Manhole for the AAE-1 intercontinental submarine cable located on the Vieille Chapelle beach in Marseille, managed by Omantel and Sipartech.
All the intercontinental submarine cables, Internet eXchange Points and data centers hosting the many digital services of the world’s leading companies in the sector make Marseille France’s second largest digital hub after Paris, and the 7th largest in the world today, on the way to becoming the 5th.
Data centers: an opportunistic territorial presence and more-than-welcoming state policies
View of the Grand Port Maritime de Marseille, with the roof of the MRS3 data center in the background. Source: photo taken during the Le Nuage était sous nos pieds festival walk, November 9, 2024.
All over the world, data centers are set up opportunistically, taking advantage of the specific features of each region. In Marseille, for example, it’s the presence of submarine cables for transcontinental Internet links, as well as the presence of major telecoms players and Internet exchange points. But it’s also an inexpensive land opportunity within the territory of the Grand Port Maritime de Marseille, this public industrial and commercial establishment (EPIC) directly under the supervision of the State, managed like a company, and which finds in these digital data warehouse projects a lucrative mutation opportunity for its real estate assets, formerly occupied by port activities in decline. As Christophe Castaner, Chairman of the GPMM Supervisory Board, who looks after the State’s interests in Marseille, likes to point out, the “French smartport of Marseille-Fos […] is paving the way for the concept of a maritime data hub”, and is an entrepreneurial port that “fears above all its deindustrialization”.
But generally speaking, as the France Datacenters association, the largest lobbying organization in the field, likes to say, France is “the ideal destination”, a veritable “data center nation”. Indeed, as the association explains in this vidéo promotionnellepromotional video, France boasts solid, diversified economic sectors, such as digital and telecommunications, finance, automotive and aeronautics, all of which are driving forces behind data centers.
The French government has, she continues, launched numerous initiatives and fundings dedicated to the digitization of industries (10 billion dedicated to the digital sector in recent years), enabling the data center sector to grow twofold between 2016 and 2021, with one billion euros of annual investment. But also, and above all, inexpensive and easily accessible land, low-cost electrical energy (the second cheapest in Europe, with an average of 84 euros per megawatt-hour in 2020) and low carbon emissions (because it’s mostly nuclear). France’s network infrastructure, with its fiber-optic network, 5G and intercontinental cables, is also presented as a major asset with low access costs. France’s electricity infrastructure is presented as highly developed and solid, with no infrastructure maintenance costs for data centers, as it is maintained by state-owned companies RTE and Enedis, which have pledged to invest over €100 billion in this infrastructure by 2035. The video also underlines the fact that industries in France enjoy numerous tax advantages, and even regional funding for their location.
Photo of the Free Pro headquarters building in Marseille’s newly built Smartseille district. Photo taken during the Le nuage était sous nos pieds festival walk on November 9, 2024.
Translation in progress, please check again in a few days, or continue with the french version 🙂