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

Central and Eastern Europe remain underserved by data centres, despite favourable conditions, a new mapping tool shows.

Now, as the European Union prepares to invest €20 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories, Poland and the Baltics are pushing to secure investment and strengthen the region’s digital sovereignty.

The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Energy and AI Observatory recently published a report on data centre availability in Europe, covering both existing and planned facilities.

The IEA’s interactive map highlights operating hubs with less than 500 megawatt (MW) capacity (in blue), operating hubs with more than 500 MW capacity (in green), and planned hubs with more than 500 MW capacity.

It’s known that data centres, especially specialised types of data centres that are optimised for AI and HPC, are best suited to colder climates with abundant water resources.

Yet, currently, most hubs remain concentrated in Western and Southern Europe, while Central and Eastern Europe – aside from smaller hubs already operating (colored in blue) and a larger hub planned in Poland – remain largely underserved.

AI-optimised data centres in the region are crucial for the EU’s eastern flank. They drive economic growth by creating a modest number of high-value jobs, add to the development of local AI ecosystems, and reduce latency and improve performance for finance, cloud services, AI, and streaming.

Finally, the optical benefits should not be overlooked: investments in Central and Eastern European data centres and AI capacity send positive signals to foreign investors, which is especially important for countries whose proximity to Russia has hindered investment flows over the past three years.

This is crucially important because private investment in data centres in the region remains modest, despite local governments’ willingness to welcome related foreign direct investment and the relatively flexible conditions, both climatic and administrative.

What's next: AI gigafactories

The European Commission’s decisions regarding the upcoming AI gigafactories (with four to five planned) will be of crucial importance, signalling the bloc’s trust in and willingness to invest in its eastern flank.

AI gigafactories will be state-of-the-art, large-scale AI compute and data storage hubs, purpose-built to develop, train, and deploy next-generation AI models and applications at hyperscale – for example, models with hundreds of trillions of parameters.

By integrating vast computing power, energy-efficient data centres, and AI-driven automation, these facilities will set new benchmarks for AI model training, inference, and deployment.

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

Interestingly, the Commission has chosen not to disclose the identities of the applicants, citing “confidential business information provided in their expressions of interest”.

However, it is known that in June, Poland and the Baltic states applied jointly for an AI gigafactory, signalling both Polish ambition and Baltic cautiousness about the capacity of the Lumi AI factory in Finland and its accessibility to the Baltics via “antennas”.

Poland and the Baltics do not appear to be backing away from the idea, and have recently begun gathering partners interested in investing in the project or helping to build a broader AI and technology ecosystem around the initiative.