Abstract. We study the infimum of the Ginzburg-Landau functional in the case of a vanishing external magnetic field in a two dimensional simply connected domain. We obtain an energy asymptotics which is valid when the Ginzburg-Landau parameter is large and the strength of the external field is comparable with the third critical field. Compared with the known results when the external magnetic field does not vanish, we show in this regime a concentration of the energy near the zero set of the external magnetic field. Our results complete former results obtained by K. Attar and X-B. Pan-K-H. Kwek.