When the maritime traffic to Marseille’s port is underwater?

There used to a time in the 18^th century when Marseille’s port was known for trade in coffee, sugar and spices.  Following that the 19^th century industrial revolution brought the flow of raw materials as well as the construction of piers and warehouses to accommodate this new trade in this Phocaean city.

Marseille’s port today is undergoing a new transformation and it isn’t coming on boats but it is coming from some of the same trade-routes to the four corners of the earth as before.  In fact it is coming in undersea cables where Marseille has become the 6^th largest hub for data transmission in the world surpassing Hong Kong.  It is now amongst the top gateway cities to expect further growth in transmission capacity along with Singapore and Miami with 18 undersea cables.  6 more cables are expected to be added to the roster representing another 2 petabytes of data capacity (10^15 or 1 million times a gigabyte). 

So to deliver on this new tech boom, it is normal to expect Data Center players like Digital Realty, number one player globally, in the US and in France in fact, to see the how critical Marseille’s role will be.  So much so that in fact they have already built 4 data centers in Marseille and have commissioned GSE to build the 5^th one, known as MRS5.

“Data Centers in any case are just one of the 3 other parts of the data infrastructure,” says Fabrice Coquio, President of Digital Realty France, and “France is well positioned with two hubs, Paris and Marseille” .

Digital Realty has been visionary in investing in Marseille and chose GSE to build MRS5 that will be a 22MW facility with a total surface of 21,700m2 and 18,500m2 on 3 levels.  The building will have 3 data halls with 2,000 bays on 10,800m2. 

Part of the reason why GSE was chosen was due to its dedicated approach to sustainable building and in this case will feature innovations such as

– river cooling, which provide an effective and environmentally friendly manner to cool the building,

– prefabricated low-carbon concrete frame assuring lower C02 emissions

– aiming for a LEED Gold certification based on optimized energy consumption and environmental measures.

“GSE will rise to this challenge thanks to its expertise and commitment to responsible, high-performance construction. We hope that this project for Digital Realty will be the first of many, to synergize our commitment to developing high-performance, more responsible infrastructures,” emphasizes Martin de Colombel, MRS5 Project Director at GSE.