Paris Residents Fight “Noisy” Interxion Data Centre

Local residents in Paris are fighting an Interxion data centre because of noise pollution from the site.

The residents, in the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis in the north east of Paris, also argue that the data centre was built in 2012 without sufficient consultation to the local population.

A debate started this week in the Administrative Court of Montreuil, reports We.Demain.fr, that will look at the growth and impact of data centres in Paris.

A collective called Urbaxion’93, started by disgruntled local residents, is leading the debate and aims to take on data centre provider Interxion, which provides colocation data centre services across 11 countries in Europe.

“We demand the cancellation of the authorisation to operate the data centre on Rateau Street in La Courneuve, due to an irregularity of the public inquiry and shortcomings in the impact study,” said environmental lawyer Roxiane Sageloli.

Another local resident told newspaper Reporterre that one concern is the amount of electricity the data centre consumes to power its eight generators.

“These generators produce 76 megawatts of electricity , equivalent to the consumption of a town of 50,000 inhabitants ,” said Khadija Ait Oumasste.

The data centre in question, Interxion’s PAR7 4,500m2 site, officially has 64MW of power capacity and was opened in November 2012.

Interxion has yet to respond to TechWeekEurope’s request for comment.

We.Demain quoted local resident Mijajlovic Matilda: “It’s always noisy and was implemented without sufficient consultation with the population.”

Merger

In February, Interxion announced a planned merger with European data centre provider Telecity in a move which would make the resulting company larger in terms of market share than Equinix in the European data centre colocation market.

But a few months later, the company was snubbed by Telecity as the London-based company got in bed with Equinix in a £2.35 billion data centre deal.

Take our data centre quiz here!