Lascaux bison, foie gras and canoes on the Vézère. The Dordogne has offered the same postcard for fifty years, that of a simple France before machines. However, in striking contrast, ten minutes from the famous cave, a closed paper mill is due to house an artificial intelligence supercomputer at the end of 2027. The SPB group (via its subsidiary Condat Solutions) announces two billion euros of investment. But a petition from residents already has more than 5,600 signatures, and 400 people filled the Lardin-Saint-Lazare village hall on September 30. However, this file arrives in a country where data centers and bitcoin miners are already heating homes but local reluctance is still very often present.
Condat Solutions: what SPB promises to the Vézère valley
The Sarthe group SPB, headed by Ghislain Huot, bought the site in March, thereby laying off 164 employees (while retaining twenty-one of them). The new company is called Condat Solutions and its project is called “IA-Factory”. According to the announcement made to ICI Périgord, the project aims to create 250 direct jobs over time. A school would also train up to 200 specialists per year. SPB specifies that the site will not store data. but will instead be intended to sell “secure power” to manufacturers, hospitals and laboratories. The first tranche, of around 25 megawatts, is due to start at the end of 2027.
The main argument is financial. The mayor of the town, Francine Bourra, in favor of the project, recalled this at a meeting. In fact, cleaning up a paper mill costs “hundreds of millions of euros”. Beyond this point the site also has a major advantage with a gas and electricity connection. This is a truly decisive asset, since RTE has received connection requests for 18 gigawatts of data centers in recent months and the queue now numbers 80 projects.
Lascaux, Natura 2000 and 5,600 signatures: the rising rebellion
But the area is sensitive: the very famous Lascaux cave is a ten-minute drive away and the surrounding area is a UNESCO world heritage site with the added bonus of a Natura 2000 zone. Thousands of jobs also depend on tourism. Seven residents launched the Vigilance Condat collective in July, then the Lacovenat association. Their petition collected 5,600 signatures, while the two municipalities have 2,500 inhabitants, highlighting a concern which seems to go beyond the strictly local framework. On September 30, more than 400 people filled the village hall to discuss the project. The questions first focused on cooling water. Then on the identity of the customers of the future computing power, which SPB did not give even if Mathieu Introvigne, who manages the energy component, mentions “leads” for the heat of the servers. For example strawberry greenhouses, wood drying or fish farming. “The time for studies is still underway,” he repeated to residents. Finally, questions were also raised about the democratic control of equipment designed far away from them. “What control will we have against AI? », summarizes the France 3 Périgord report. The constituency's deputy, Sébastien Peytavie, remains cautious. No public inquiry has yet been opened.
The Dordogne is not the only one to face this type of problem. At the other end of the country, the Marseille collective The cloud was under our feet lists 32 local oppositions to data centers in mainland France. In Fouju (Seine-et-Marne), a 1.4 gigawatt project, for example, gathered 71,625 signatures against it. In Châteauroux, the Google data center brought together 18,000. The National Commission for Public Debate is therefore holding a meeting there on November 9. The State is accelerating. The simplification law adopted in 2026 makes it possible to classify these sites as “projects of major national interest” to shorten procedures. And a 2025 decree already requires large centers to use their waste heat.
The energy equation: 25 megawatts in a queue of 18 gigawatts
The 25 megawatts of the first tranche of Condat have little weight on a national scale. In May 2026, RTE had nearly 18 gigawatts of capacity reserved for around 80 data center projects. For comparison: it was 5 gigawatts and 40 projects at the end of 2024. Most of the files ask for 100 to 200 megawatts, and a dozen even exceed 400. Condat therefore plays in the lower category, but he leaves, as we have said, with the advantage of already having an electrical connection, a connection that other projects sometimes wait for months or years.
The network manager has actually changed the allocation rules this year. By the end of 2026, the “first ready, first served” principle replaces that of first come. The goal is to eliminate paper projects. Because RTE has measured that the centers connected for two or three years only use on average 20% of the requested power. The operators themselves plan ten to fifteen years to reach 80% of their target consumption. An old paper mill already connected to gas and high voltage ticks the “ready” box faster than an old beet field in Seine-et-Marne.
Bitcoin mining is dying out, AI is not
However, France does not lack electricity. Its fleet is 95% decarbonized and the country exported 100 terawatt hours in 2025 according to RTE. The bottleneck is rather in the lines and in the posts. Data centers today consume around 10 TWh per year, or 2% of national consumption. RTE then targets 23 to 28 TWh in 2035. On a global scale, the International Energy Agency has estimated data centers at 485 TWh in 2025. It is even counting on 950 TWh in 2030. The Bitcoin network is around 138 TWh per year according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance. With 52.4% carbon-free energy in its mix.
But the real difference lies in the flexibility offered by Bitcion mining farms. A farm goes dark in seconds when the network saturates. She even gets paid for it. Riot Platforms thus collected $56.7 million in demand response credits over the year 2025 from the Texan manager ERCOT, according to the CoinShares report from March 2026. AI model training, on the other hand, does not interrupt without losing calculation days. Texas has also drawn from this with its SB 6 law. It requires remote disconnection capacity for large loads. Nothing equivalent exists in France at the moment. And Generation Z has already chosen its culprit in the match between AI and mining.
Controversies on the subject are not new: bitcoin miners suffered the same criticisms over water and electricity consumption or noise pollution before AI overtook them in visibility and number of projects. In the meantime, SPB is maintaining the end of 2027 as the target for its first phase. As for the Vigilance Condat petition, it still had 5,600 signatures at the beginning of October.
