Coal, then steel, then compute.
Totel says local authorities in Hauts-de-France already understand what a large plant is. This is why. Seven scenes on the ground DATA4 has bought, from the pit that Zola wrote about to a 700 MW campus and the one number nobody can yet verify.
The coal was found in 1720.
Coal was struck at Fresnes-sur-Escaut in 1720. The Compagnie des mines d’Anzin was created in 1757, and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais basin became the largest coalfield in France. Escaudain sits inside it, beside the terril Renard.
Zola set Germinal in this landscape. The spoil heaps are still there, and they are the reason the land around them is flat, cheap and already industrial.
Then Usinor, and the blowers.
The specific ground DATA4 has taken is the Parc des Soufflantes, a brownfield of the former Usinor steelworks, one of the largest units of Usinor-Denain. The plant closed in 1988.
The site is named for what survived the demolition. The soufflantes, the blast-furnace blowers built in the 1920s, still stand as an industrial monument. The land around them has been empty for the better part of four decades.
The poorest town in France.
Neighbouring Denain has repeatedly been ranked the poorest town in France with more than 20,000 inhabitants. Its poverty rate runs above 40 per cent.
Escaudain itself has about 9,000 people. Average income per head is €17,370 against a French figure near €20,590. Unemployment sits around 14.6 per cent against a national rate closer to 8. The population is still falling.
Then UNESCO listed the wreckage.
On 30 June 2012 the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coal basin was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list: 353 elements across 109 sites, roughly 4,000 hectares, described as an evolving living cultural landscape.
It is an unusual thing to protect. Not a monument but the residue of an industry that left, and the terrain it left behind. That terrain is now the asset.
700 megawatts, pre-reserved.
The state put the site on the fast-track list. RTE pre-reserved 700 MW for it, the CRE approved the accelerated connection procedure on 7 May 2025, and the power would arrive from the poste de Mastaing, about six kilometres away.
This is what Totel means when he says only one of his four reasons is electricity. The grid headroom is real, but so is the land, the data gravity between four capitals, and a council that has wanted a large plant back since 1988.
€5bn, and a sentence about scars.
La Porte du Hainaut selected DATA4 in December 2025. The company confirmed the project on 12 June 2026: €5 billion, four data centres, first service from 2030. It is the largest single tranche of the €15bn Brookfield committed to France at the Paris AI summit.
“We aim to erase the last remnants of an industrial era and open a new, more technological chapter.”
Aymeric Robin, president of La Porte du Hainaut and mayor of Raismes. He is a communist, welcoming a Canadian asset manager onto a steelworks grave.
Four years from announcement to a working hall.
Escaudain was confirmed in June 2026 and first serves in 2030. That gap is normal for a campus of this size, and it is also the reason almost nothing about the site can be verified today. Land, grid reservation and planning are checkable now. Capacity, spend and employment are projections until the first hall is energised.
So the figures published here are what the parties have stated. DATA4 expects the completed campus to support 2,400 permanent jobs in the region, direct and indirect. Totel separately puts 2,400 people on the campus each day once fully delivered, counting staff, suppliers and customers together. Those are two different measures, and neither is a headcount on a payroll.
For scale: data centres are capital-heavy and labour-light once running, and comparable hyperscale campuses report somewhere between 60 and 200 permanent on-site roles, with construction employment far larger and temporary. Whether Escaudain lands nearer the site figure or the regional one depends on how much of the supply chain settles locally, which is exactly what the Hauts-de-France case is being made on.
This page will carry the answer rather than the estimate. The first phase energising in 2030 is the moment the projection becomes a measurement, and this scene will be updated then.
Announced · projection, measurable from 2030Compiled by the Entelligencia desk. The project is at feasibility and permitting stage; capacity, investment, timeline and employment figures are company and local-authority announcements, not delivered outcomes.
