Data centres: too many blank spots in Central and Eastern Europe

By&nbspEgle Markeviciute EU Tech Loop pinch Euronews

Published on 24/08/2025 - 8:00 GMT+2

Central and Eastern Europe stay underserved by information centres, contempt favourable conditions, a caller mapping instrumentality shows.

Now, arsenic nan European Union prepares to put €20 billion successful artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories, Poland and nan Baltics are pushing to unafraid finance and fortify nan region’s integer sovereignty.

The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Energy and AI Observatory precocious published a report connected information centre readiness successful Europe, covering some existing and planned facilities.

The IEA’s interactive representation highlights operating hubs pinch little than 500 megawatt (MW) capacity (in blue), operating hubs pinch much than 500 MW capacity (in green), and planned hubs pinch much than 500 MW capacity.

It’s known that information centres, particularly specialised types of information centres that are optimised for AI and HPC, are champion suited to colder climates pinch abundant h2o resources.

Yet, currently, astir hubs stay concentrated successful Western and Southern Europe, while Central and Eastern Europe – speech from smaller hubs already operating (colored successful blue) and a larger hub planned successful Poland – stay mostly underserved.

AI-optimised information centres successful nan region are important for nan EU’s eastbound flank. They thrust economical maturation by creating a humble number of high-value jobs, adhd to nan improvement of section AI ecosystems, and trim latency and amended capacity for finance, unreality services, AI, and streaming.

Finally, nan optical benefits should not beryllium overlooked: investments successful Central and Eastern European information centres and AI capacity nonstop affirmative signals to overseas investors, which is particularly important for countries whose proximity to Russia has hindered finance flows complete nan past 3 years.

This is crucially important because backstage finance successful information centres successful nan region remains modest, contempt section governments’ willingness to invited related overseas nonstop finance and nan comparatively elastic conditions, some climatic and administrative.

What's next: AI gigafactories

The European Commission’s decisions regarding nan upcoming AI gigafactories (with 4 to 5 planned) will beryllium of important importance, signalling nan bloc’s spot successful and willingness to put successful its eastbound flank.

AI gigafactories will beryllium state-of-the-art, large-scale AI compute and information retention hubs, purpose-built to develop, train, and deploy next-generation AI models and applications astatine hyperscale – for example, models pinch hundreds of trillions of parameters.

By integrating immense computing power, energy-efficient information centres, and AI-driven automation, these accommodation will group caller benchmarks for AI exemplary training, inference, and deployment.

The Commission announced successful June that it had received 76 expressions of liking from 16 EU countries to build AI gigafactories, for which it plans to allocate €20 billion.

Interestingly, nan Commission has chosen not to disclose nan identities of nan applicants, citing “confidential business accusation provided successful their expressions of interest”.

However, it is known that successful June, Poland and nan Baltic states applied jointly for an AI gigafactory, signalling some Polish ambition and Baltic cautiousness astir nan capacity of nan Lumi AI mill successful Finland and its accessibility to nan Baltics via “antennas”.

Poland and nan Baltics do not look to beryllium backing distant from nan idea, and person precocious begun gathering partners willing successful investing successful nan task aliases helping to build a broader AI and exertion ecosystem astir nan initiative.