Digital Realty has 12 operating data centers comprising 1 million square feet in Paris (with 85 megawatts) and four data centers in Marseille, totaling another half million square feet of data center capacity (with 45 megawatts).
The REIT has another 48 megawatts under construction in Paris, which is roughly 44% preleased. “That’s $750 million worth of development in Paris under construction today,” says Jordan Sadler, Digital Realty’s senior vice president of public and private investor relations. He adds that the REIT is the largest data center operator in Paris and Marseille.
French telecom company Orange was selected by Olympic Broadcasting Services to be the only service provider delivering live coverage from Paris 2024, including 878 events from 35 competition venues across France.
Network resilience is critical, and Orange must anticipate everything from cyber-attacks and climate disasters to fiber outages. “The mission, of course, is reliability of the content capture and distribution,” Sadler says.
Proximity Can Be Key
In the case of Paris, Sadler says, you have to think about all the providers of the technology, communications, and broadcasting around the Olympics. “Our data centers support that.”
Sadler says five of Digital Realty’s data centers are located very near where the Olympics are being held, and that will ultimately help support the IT load.
“That data center capacity is very well-situated to be able to support all the systems integrators, cloud players, networks, and telecommunications companies, and then just every IT-oriented company that’s playing a supporting role around the Olympics,” he explains.
Proximity can be key, Sadler continues, especially when it relates not only to communication but also broadcasting video over the internet.
“When people think about data centers, they don’t often think of ‘location, location, location,’ but being proximate to the games is important because of the latency factor,” Sadler says. “The closer you are, the better the performance is going to be of the networks, and essentially, capturing the distribution of this footage and other communications around it.”
The significance of Marseille, he notes, is that sailing at the Olympic Games will take place on the waters of the Marseille Marina. “Our data centers are well-situated vis-à-vis the capture and distribution of content around the games that are seafaring in nature,” Sadler notes. “In Marseille, we have over 200 networks, which is essentially one of the densest network hubs in the world.”
Economic Impact
There’s obviously a large economic benefit from the Olympics, but Sadler says it’s hard to pinpoint specifically in a short window of time as it relates to Digital Realty.
“Demand has been building for at least the last five years,” he says. “And while we’ve seen incremental demand this year that we feel very confident is tied to the Olympics, it’s hard to peg it specifically and relative to the scale of our company. There’s just been a nice boost to that market.”
