Set up your international business in Eastern France (Grand Est Region)

Why set up your company in Eastern France?

Eastern France is located on the 3rd largest information superhighway worldwide, the London-Paris-Frankfurt axis, but also on another North/South European way, making it the ideal location your IT business. All the territory with its 5,132 cities will be connected to the ultra-high-speed broadband by 2023. The deployment of 5G has already started in key cities like Mulhouse, Reims and Strasbourg. Among the advantages of the region, you will find leading international IT companies such as Orange, numerous SME’s, start-ups and scale-ups, a network of incubators and an accelerator, and various R&D centres. The region was rewarded by the national label French Tech (East).

As a matter of fact, Eastern France and neighbouring cross-border regions are home to one of the highest densities of laboratories and researchers in Europe. Computer sciences, imaging, AI, robotics etc. are particularly well represented.

Key figures in the IT sector

• 9,000 companies, among them 1,500 start-ups 34,000 jobs, among them 30,100 salaried workers 16% of IT jobs in companies
• 10,000 researchers
• 24 university training programmes
• 6,700 students

Data centres & operators

Eastern France hosts multiple data centres, among them Adista, Advanced Mediomatrix, SFR, Orange, OVH, Datadock, Hexanet, Ikoula andTrekk and a net centre of 22 000 m² that is located in the European capital of Strasbourg. Further, you will find a concentration of numerous international, national, and regional telecom operators.

Easy access to a strongly qualified workforce

Eastern France Region’s universities offer a talent pool of more than 200,000 students among which 28,000 from abroad.

• Five Universities including two European campuses
  • Strasbourg University
  • Lorraine University
  • Reims Champagne-Ardenne University
  • South Alsace University
  • Troyes Technological University
• Four public research organizations:
  • CNRS
  • INRIA
  • INRA
  • INSERM
• 50 high schools including 30 engineering schools
• 15,000 engineers graduating each year

The region’s advantages for the sector do not stop here! Eastern France has a very elaborate R&D ecosystem that is of great advantage to any company that choses to have a seat here.

• 12,000 private and public researchers
• 180 R&D labs
• Five active Nobel Prize Winners
• 6 incubators
• 4 FrenchTech communities
• Two Billion € private R&D expenses

An ambitious regional IT policy

Eastern France Artificial Intelligence Plan impacts the sectors of smart manufacturing, bioeconomy, and health.

It includes the creation of:

• An AI accelerator to support 100 start-ups 
• An AI solutions providers portal
• A data sharing platform 
• An industrial laboratory: AIDA (AI Data Analysis)

This plan is part of the dynamic of the European AI Valley, linked to Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.

The Eastern France Business Act is in the heart of the IT challenge. It foresees:

• To support 1,000 companies in their digital transformation
• To realize 1,000 cybersecurity diagnostics for SME’s
• The creation of 10 data lakes
• The creation of a regional digital institute.

Finally, Eastern France’s Region is actively involved in the European projects of EDIH (European Digital Innovation Hub) and GAIA-X for the implementation of a European cloud offer. 

Since 2002, the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne is host to the ROMEO Regional Computing Centre, a technological platform with the role to provide the region's industrialists and researchers with high-performance computing resources, secure storage spaces, adapted software, support in the use of these tools as well as expertise in advanced scientific fields and high-performance computing to name just a few services.