Lyon

As France's second-largest economic hub, Lyon has established itself as the country's third-largest data center market, situated at the crossroads of north-south traffic flows between Paris, the Mediterranean, and Italy. Its geographic location makes it a natural hub for companies seeking to serve the Mediterranean region, Switzerland, and Central Europe from an infrastructure outside the Île-de-France region, with competitive latencies to major markets. Lyon’s data center ecosystem includes some fifteen colocation facilities spread across the metropolitan area, with operators such as SFR Business, nLighten, DataOne, and SHD. Network connectivity relies on France-IX AURA (formerly LyonIX), an internet exchange deployed across eight geographically distributed points of presence in the metropolitan area, with 75 active peers and an installed capacity of 1.3 Tbps. This neutral interconnection node enables direct peering with telecom operators, hosting providers, and content providers in the region. France applies the European GDPR framework and the Military Programming Law for operators of vital importance. Data centers of a certain capacity are subject to the tertiary sector decree on energy efficiency and must comply with reporting obligations to ARCEP.