Data centers: too many blank spots in the CEE
The IEA's data center map shows that Central and Eastern Europe remains underserved by data centers, despite favorable conditions. As the EU prepares €20B AI Gigafactories, Poland and the Baltics push to secure investment and strengthen the region’s digital sovereignty.”
Recently, the International Energy Agency’s Energy and AI Observatory published a report on data center availability in Europe, covering both existing and planned facilities.
The IEA’s interactive map highlights operating hubs with less than 500 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 centers, especially specialized types of data centers, optimized 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 - remains largely underserved.
AI-optimized data centers in the CEE are crucial for the EU’s Eastern flank, not only because they drive economic growth and create a modest number yet high-value jobs, add to the development of local AI ecosystems, but also reduce latency and improve performance for finance, cloud services, AI, and streaming.
Finally, the optical benefits should not be overlooked: investments in CEE data centers and AI capacity send positive signals to foreign investors, 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 centers in the CEE remains modest, despite local governments’ willingness to welcome related FDI 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 4–5 planned) will be of crucial importance, signaling the European Union’s trust in and willingness to invest in the eastern flank of the EU.
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, e.g. 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 European Commission announced in June that it had received 76 expressions of interest from 16 EU Member States 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 have applied jointly for an AI Gigafactory (See the announcement of Polish Digital Secretary of State Dariusz Standerski below), signalling both Polish ambition and Baltic cautiousness about the Finnish Lumi's capacity 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.
