French colo firm Castle IT is opening a second data center.

The company expects the new site, in Saint-Omer, a city in the Pas-de-Calais department of northern France, to be open by the end of the year.

It is the firm’s second data center and will cover 200 sqm (2,150 sq ft); it will also complement its larger facility in Larçay, near the city of Tours. IT capacity of the new site has not been disclosed.

Castle IT’s Josué Depeux told local news outlet La Nouvelle République that the data center would allow its customers "to have a second backup solution, which is not too far from Larçay.”

He said: “We are targeting customers in the Hauts-de-France region. We will have 40 racks there. In Larçay, we have 264."

The company was founded in 2016 and says it offers a sovereign French IT environment for its clients. In 2022, it announced plans for two other data centers in France, but these do not appear to have come to fruition.

Northern France is becoming a hotbed of data center activity, with several large campuses planned, seeking to take advantage of brownfield industrial sites which already have power connections.

Escudain, where Data4 is planning a 700MW campus, and Dunkirk are among the cities in the region that could host new data centers.