Panels on AI demand, cooling innovation, and gigawatt-scale design at Datacloud Global Congress 2026 reached a consistent and commercially significant finding: AI workloads are not displacing cloud demand but compounding it, and the architectural implications (for cooling, power density, rack design, and community engagement) are unlike anything the European market has previously absorbed.

The European data centre market has grown steadily for the better part of two decades on the back of cloud migration, digital transformation, and the proliferation of connected services. Annual cloud growth has run at 20% to 30%. That growth is now being overlaid by AI demand that panellists at DCGC 2026 described as categorically different in scale, density, and infrastructure requirements.