Europe's AI Data Centers Are Moving 175 Kilometers Out of Town, Chasing Electricity

The average AI data center campus planned in Europe between 2026 and 2028 will sit 175 kilometers from the nearest major hub city. Campuses delivered between 2022 and 2025 averaged 46 kilometers. That near-quadrupling, from JLL data shared with Reuters and reported Wednesday, is the cleanest measure yet of what the AI buildout is doing to Europe's digital geography: compute is no longer being placed where the users are. It is being placed where the electricity is.

"The determining factor is increasingly where sufficient power can be secured, rather than simply where demand exists," said Assad Noori, JLL's head of data centres for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "Data centres are being brought to where the power is, not the other way around."

The distance figure is a symptom of deeper compositional change. Greenfield sites, undeveloped land with no existing infrastructure, now make up 39% of Europe's forward pipeline, against 8% of what was delivered over the prior three years. The share of pipeline capacity in inner-city locations is set to fall to 5% from 13%. JLL expects the four largest hyperscale cloud providers to spend $725 billion this year, up 77% from $410 billion in 2025, mostly on AI compute, and AI workloads to make up half of global data center capacity by 2030.

None of that money is abandoning FLAP-D, the established cluster of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin. Live capacity there has reached 3.8GW, more than double 2019, with 1.4GW building. But vacancy across the five markets is 6.4%, just 3.1% in Frankfurt, and the price of powered land tells the rest. JLL puts it at an average of EUR 2.36 million per megawatt of IT load in the core markets, topping out at EUR 2.7 million in Amsterdam. Secondary cities such as Copenhagen, Warsaw and Milan average EUR 978,000; tertiary locations like Bordeaux average EUR 512,000, falling as low as EUR 200,000.

"London has already seen significant digital infrastructure development driven by cloud and has other asset classes competing for space leading to high land prices," said Rupert Duckworth, EMEA data centre advisory associate director at Savills. "Power is now constrained in the key cloud locations across the market."

Grid queues are the harder constraint. In the Netherlands, TenneT's waiting list for electricity offtake runs to 212 requests totaling 38GW, with regional operators holding 14,044 more worth 9GW. TenneT says there will be no additional headroom across large parts of Noord-Holland until 2036, and in April a Dutch court upheld its right to park a 70MW connection request near Schiphol on a waiting list indefinitely. Ireland lifted its de facto Dublin moratorium in December 2025 after four years, but on terms that function as a filter: new applicants must install on-site generation or storage covering their full demand, and feed power back when the grid needs it. Data centers already account for roughly half of regional electricity demand around Dublin.

So the pipeline has gone elsewhere. Of nine proposed gigawatt-plus campuses tracked by DC Byte, only one, near Paris, is close to a major city; the rest are scattered from rural Spain to northern Sweden. EdgeConneX is targeting up to 1GW in Skelleftea, on grid infrastructure built out for Northvolt's battery plant, and atNorth is planning 300MW in Solleftea for early 2028. In Extremadura, one of Spain's poorest regions, Edged and Merlin are developing two campuses of up to 1GW each, while Portugal's Start Campus has energized the first 26MW of a planned 1.2GW site at Sines.

Why It Matters

Electricity has displaced fiber as the binding constraint on where digital infrastructure gets built, and physics makes the retreat inland possible. Light in fiber covers roughly 200 kilometers per millisecond, so a training cluster 175 kilometers from Frankfurt adds under a millisecond of round-trip latency, irrelevant to a job that runs for weeks and never touches an end user. Inference is the opposite: live chat and enterprise copilots operate on 20 to 50 millisecond budgets, which forces metropolitan proximity. Europe is therefore not decentralizing its data centers so much as splitting them into two industries with two maps: remote, power-hungry training campuses in Norrland and Extremadura, and latency-bound inference capacity that stays in FLAP-D and keeps bidding up land there.

The split carries distributional consequences. Regions that spent a decade losing population are suddenly objects of multi-billion-euro courtship, which is what governments in Extremadura and northern Sweden wanted. It also relocates the conflict: grid capacity, cooling water and land use are contested locally, and communities of a few thousand now negotiate with counterparties spending $725 billion a year. Reuters notes developers risk local opposition over habitat loss and competition for power and water, which has already delayed projects in Ireland and the Netherlands. For utilities, an urban load problem becomes a transmission problem: the cheap power sits in Norrbotten and Alentejo, demand is moving there to meet it, and the lines were not built for either.

What To Watch

Whether tertiary land pricing holds as competition arrives; a spread from EUR 2.7 million per megawatt in Amsterdam to EUR 200,000 in parts of France is wide enough to close fast. Whether Ireland's on-site generation mandate becomes a template: if the Netherlands or Germany copy it, self-supply stops being a differentiator and becomes the price of admission. Whether DC Byte's nine gigawatt-plus campuses convert into financed capacity, or join the several gigawatts of announced Iberian projects analysts still decline to count as active. And watch transmission. The distance between where Europe generates cheap clean power and where it historically consumed it is now a business model, and whoever gets paid to close that gap captures an outsized share of this buildout.