[citation needed] Announced on March 26, 2013, 42 was opened in Paris on July 15, 2013, for the selection phase called La Piscine (the swimming-pool).

[5] In addition to the official campus in Paris, France, the school model was adopted in Lyon, Reims, and Mulhouse, France, as well as in Spain, Romania, South Africa, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldova,[6] Belgium, Russia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Finland,[7] Germany,[8] Adelaide, Australia,[9] Armenia,[10] the United Arab Emirates,[11] London,[12] Quebec, Canada,[13] Bangkok,[14] Florence,[15] Rome,[16] Lausanne, Switzerland,[17] Turkey, and others.

In 2015, an experiment took place with Pôle Emploi to train a group of around thirty unemployed seniors in programming for ten months.

The first selection is made using a series of logic and memory tests on the institution's website intended to assess the students' abilities to learn computer science.

Depending on their level, the student can enroll in four-week educational “pools” to discover new programming paradigms: web in PHP, object-oriented in C++, functional in OCaml and Unity.

The objective when creating 42 is to allow the creation of 150 companies each year, including five Internet giants, in the hope that these young shoots pay their apprenticeship tax to the establishment.

On November 2, 2014, one of the 6- cameras installed at Nicolas Sadirac's request, caught him spanking a young women, followed by sexual intercourse, in one of the school's amphitheater.

The educational curriculum of these establishments is based on a common core, but the campuses can adapt their projects to the labor pools in which they are located.

In June 2019, 42 announced the opening of eleven new campuses by 2020, including in Rio, São Paulo, Jakarta, Yerevan, Tokyo, Bogotá, Angoulême, Madrid, and Quebec.