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February 2022

Martha

  • Reborn at 76
  • This imposing and virtually indestructible structure was built by the Nazis in 1943 to house about 30 U-Boats. Today it is MRS3, an Interxion data centre that handles cloud computing for the world’s biggest corporations.
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Fabrice Coquio, le directeur général, a fait d’Interxion France un opérateur écoresponsable de data centers neutres en carbone depuis fin 2020.

She’s 251m long and her reinforced concrete roof is 5.5m thick. She’s Martha. That’s the name given to this gigantic blockhouse for which no one had found a use since 1945. Even the demolition project was abandoned as being too costly. There was no solution in sight until Interxion thought of using it for a 7100m2-plus data centre to house the cloud data of the world’s biggest corporations. No sooner said than done - at an investment cost of €140 million. Interxion was keen to highlight the heritage value of the building and conducted a major conservation programme with photos, documentary videos, a virtual tour and meetings with historians. Architecturally, the existing outside superstructure has been incorporated in a contemporary design that blends well with the surrounding port buildings and chimes with the modernity of its function. The top part has been clad in Corten, that rust-coloured, weatherproof protective coating that looks like an old ship’s corroded hull. MRS3 is Interxion’s third data centre in Marseille. A fourth is underway. This puts Marseille in seventh place among the world’s biggest internet hubs. Which is unsurprising when you know that 99% of world Internet traffic goes through undersea optical fibres and that Marseille has 15 of these, connecting the city with 43 countries and 4.5 billion mobile phone users.

By Maurice Gouiran

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