The Prime Minister inaugurated Ifremer's headquarters building in Brest on February 6, 2021.

Co-financed by the State and local authorities, Ifremer's head office is located on the Institute's largest scientific research center. It houses the central services and governance of the institute formerly located in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Called "Bougainville", this building, built according to the High Environmental Quality (HQE) standards, is part of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach that now guides the institute's actions.

The Ifremer center in Brittany, an important center for ocean sciences in France

With the metropolis of Brest as the home port of its headquarters, Ifremer has made a strategic choice by joining its largest research center and numerous partner research organizations.

Today, 900 of the 1,500 people at Ifremer work in central Brittany, the vast majority in Plouzané, but also in Concarneau, Dinard and Lorient.

All of the institute's scientific fields are represented there: fisheries and aquaculture, deep-sea ecosystems and marine geology, observation of the ocean and coastal environment, renewable marine energies, and the economy of the sea. Major experimental facilities such as the ocean engineering test basin, the Sainte-Anne du Portzic offshore study site and experimental platforms are implemented there.

The location of the head office in Brest also helps to strengthen the links between the administrative staff and the scientific teams of central Brittany and the management of the French Oceanographic Fleet that the institute has been operating since its unification in 2018. The Plouzané site also hosts teams from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the University of Western Brittany (UBO), the Research Institute for Development (IRD) and the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES). It hosts the management of the European infrastructure EuroArgo, which observes the relationship between ocean and climate, OceanOps, the joint technical center of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC-UNESCO) for oceanography and marine meteorology, the management of the Genavir subsidiary and the headquarters of the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile-Victor (IPEV).

Within the World Marine Campus, Ifremer benefits above all from a flourishing ecosystem in terms of higher education and research in marine science and technology. Ifremer teams nurture and benefit from numerous collaborations with teams from UBO, IPEV, the French Navy's Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service (Shom) and several engineering schools: the École nationale supérieure des techniques avancées de Bretagne (ENSTA Bretagne), the École Navale, the École nationale supérieure Mines-Télécom Atlantique Bretagne-Pays de Loire (IMT Atlantique), the École nationale d'ingénieurs de Brest (ENIB). Ifremer also takes advantage of the Technopôle Brest Iroise and the collaborations with companies gathered in the Mer Bretagne Atlantique competitiveness cluster.