Scaleway: PAR2 Data Center

The PAR2 Data Center is the second Availability Zone (AZ) in the Paris region offered by Scaleway and is housed in its own purpose-built facility (the “DC5” site) in Paris, France. 

This zone is designed around high sustainability and performance: 100% powered by renewable energy, employing advanced adiabatic (“free-cooling”) systems to reduce energy use, and delivered for cloud, bare-metal, colocation and hybrid use-cases

Strategically, PAR2 sits within the Paris metropolitan region (a major European connectivity hub), enabling low-latency access to Western Europe and beyond, while offering “sovereign” cloud infrastructure for organisations concerned about data jurisdiction and resilience. 

⚙️ Facility Highlights

• Entirely powered by renewable energy (wind and hydro) and certified for sustainability.
• Employs adiabatic cooling (free‐cooling) rather than traditional mechanical air-conditioning, resulting in energy savings of approximately 30-40% compared with a traditional data centre. 
• PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) significantly lower than industry average; cited values for the DC5 site in PAR2 mention PUE ≈ 1.15 or 1.16. 
• High availability architecture with multiple Availability Zones in the Paris region separated by more than 10 km to provide resilience across zones. 
• Designed for cloud native, IaaS and bare-metal operations: customers can deploy virtual instances, dedicated servers and block/object storage into this AZ. 

🔐 Security & Compliance

• The facility is certified under ISO 50001 (Energy management) and holds the French HDS (Hébergement de Données de Santé) approvals at Level 1 and Level 2, supporting health-data hosting in France. 
• Scaleway emphasises the infrastructure is “high availability and hyper-secure” though detailed physical security measures specific to PAR2 are not publicised in full. 

🌐 Connectivity & Carrier Access

• Located in Paris, a major European internet-exchange and carrier-neutral hub, enabling low-latency connectivity across France, Europe and international networks. (While exact carrier lists are not published for PAR2, the location implies strong connectivity).
• The AZ structure (PAR2) enables customers to build across two zones in the same region (e.g., PAR1 and PAR2) to enhance resilience and inter-zone redundancy. 

💼 Who It Serves

• Enterprises and public-sector organisations in France and Europe looking for cloud infrastructure with sovereignty, performance and environmental credentials.
• Service providers (cloud/IaaS), bare-metal providers and developers seeking high-performance infrastructure with low environmental impact and resilient availability zones.
• Industries such as healthcare, finance and regulated sectors that require certified infrastructure (HDS, ISO 50001) and the ability to host data within France.
• Workloads requiring compute-intensive, high-density or GPU-enabled deployments (as Scaleway uses the PAR2 zone for its custom-built GPU clusters) where environmental performance is also a factor.