OVHcloud Gravelines Data Center
Converted tobacco plant near Gravelines Nuclear Station cooled by custom water towers
The story
Nestled inside the Port of Dunkirk in northern France, OVHcloud Gravelines was repurposed from a sprawling Seita industrial warehouse. Positioned next to the Gravelines Nuclear Power Station, the site draws abundant low-carbon electrical power. Instead of traditional refrigeration chillers, Gravelines deploys OVH's homegrown liquid-cooling architecture: chilled water pumps directly through custom copper water blocks on every CPU, dumping heat into external dry coolers. The design delivers a PUE of 1.09.
Notable
- Located on a former Seita aluminum/tobacco storage depot inside the Port of Dunkirk.
- Situated less than six kilometers from Gravelines Nuclear Power Station, Western Europe's largest nuclear plant.
- Relies on OVHcloud's proprietary in-house water-cooling loop cooling processors without air conditioning.
- Designed to house up to 400,000 servers in containerized gallery wings with a PUE below 1.10.
Expansions
- 2016: Expansion of modular shipping-container server galleries GRA2 and GRA3
- 2022: Upgrades to custom proprietary liquid water blocks for next-generation bare-metal instances
Sources
- OVHcloud Water-Cooling and Environmental Metrics · OVHcloud · 2024-01-20
- OVH ouvre à Gravelines le plus grand centre de données d'Europe · Le Monde · 2013-02-08
- Inside OVHcloud's Unique Liquid-Cooled Server Operations · Data Center Frontier · 2021-04-14
Part of the open famous data centers dataset (CC BY 4.0). Updated 2026-10-15. A correction? da@mustardseedmt.com
What is OVHcloud Gravelines Data Center famous for?
Converted tobacco plant near Gravelines Nuclear Station cooled by custom water towers
Where is OVHcloud Gravelines Data Center?
OVHcloud Gravelines Data Center is in Gravelines, France (50.988, 2.128). It is operated by OVHcloud.
How much power does OVHcloud Gravelines Data Center use?
About 45 MW of IT load and 55 MW in total, according to the sources listed on this page.
What is the PUE of OVHcloud Gravelines Data Center?
1.09, reported.