Power availability has overtaken fibre connectivity as the primary determinant of where data centres are built. For European operators in particular, the gap between grid planning timelines and construction timelines has become a structural crisis, not a temporary bottleneck.

For most of the past decade, site selection for a data centre was a connectivity question first. Find the fibre, then find the power. That logic has been inverted. In market after market, panellists at DCGC 2026 described a landscape in which power availability not only determines site selection but increasingly determines whether a project proceeds at all.