Canadian investor Brookfield has announced plans to undertake a huge data centre investment drive in France as cash flows into the asset class.

Data4, the European data centre platform owned by Brookfield’s infrastructure division, will invest €15B in building French data centres, the company announced at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris this week.

The company already has a pipeline of 500 megawatts of data centre capacity in France. The planned investment will more than triple that by 2030, IPE Real Assets reported.

“We believe France has the potential to play a pivotal role in the global advancement of AI,” Brookfield Infrastructure Head of Europe Sikander Rashid said in a statement. “To achieve European leadership, it is essential to invest proactively in the infrastructure that powers AI services, particularly in data and associated infrastructure.”

Like big private equity peers Blackstone and Starwood, Brookfield is making major investments in the data centre sector due to the anticipated growth from digitisation, with an added boost coming from AI.

Brookfield bought Data4 from AXA for a reported $3.8B in April 2023. The market has moved on at such a pace that by August last year it was looking to sell a minority stake in the company’s stabilised assets, excluding the development pipeline, for the same price.

Citigroup was appointed to manage the sale, Bloomberg reported. The company’s stabilised portfolio comprises 35 data centres in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany and Luxembourg.