The city of Pau in France is building a data center for use by local businesses and government agencies.Costing €3 million ($3.4m), the 1MW data center will be paid for by the Pau Béarn Pyrénées Agglomeration (CAPBP), a group of 31 communes in the Pau area, and operated by French data center company Axione.According to the CAPBP, the data center “will be a key component of the digital development of the Pau region. It will offer data hosting services to government agencies as well as all local partners in the economy and digital sectors.”Its construction “reflects a desire to optimize the security of data, stored and controlled locally, and to ensure its sovereignty,” the organization added.Pau already operates some servers at its town hall, but this data center is limited in scope, with space for just 14 racks. The new data center, which will be housed in a 450 sqm (4,845 sq ft) building, will have space for up to 44 racks.It will utilize free cooling, and have a maximum power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.4.Work is already underway on the data center, and it is due to come online in October 2027.Pau is a city in the south of France, near the border with Spain. It does not have a large data center market, though in May it was announced that TotalEnergies had signed a contract with Dell Technologies and Nvidia to build a new €100 million ($117.4m) high-performance computing (HPC) system at the Jean Féger Scientific and Technical Center.