As AI interest surges, Europe has reached a moment of flux. The European Commission recently upped the ante, having launched plans to build four AI gigafactories, supercomputers that can train advanced AI models, with €20 billion in funding announced.
While these plans for AI are ambitious, it speaks to a wider conversation happening in Europe currently – particularly over if the continent can keep pace with the rest of the world. As countries like the US invest US$10-15 billion every quarter into AI, can Europe triple its capacity fast enough to scale?
This question sat at the heart of a panel discussion at Datacloud Energy Europe this week, moderated by Loren Long, principal, digital infrastructure division at Evermore.
Unlocking energy opportunities
The keynote panellists discovered quickly that capacity is not the main issue in this context, but everything else is.
Eric Boonstra, CEO at Kevlinx Data Centers, explained that a lack of accessibility is currently slowing deployment.
“How much does that €20 billion play into scaling plans?” he said. “It’s whether that capacity will actually be utilised. Who is the end-user? Who is the expert? It’s still early stages.”
Bjoern Stemmann, VP global solutions engineering data center at Kelvion, added: “This isn’t a lack of power, it’s a lack of transmission.
“The challenge is really getting the power to site. You have to build substations to actually bring the power to where it’s needed. You need to divide up generation versus transmission.”
Despite the challenges, the panellists agreed that legislation will help the industry move faster. Sofia Trenor, VP EU affairs at Nscale, highlighted that access to energy is important within this context.
“New frameworks are going to unlock energy that has been applied for by operators years ago and simply isn’t being used,” she said. “This is something the industry has wanted for a long time.”
Speed, chips and the shifting risk appetite
Beyond energy, the pace of the market is reshaping how data centres are financed and built. Where hyperscalers once signed 10–15-year contracts before breaking ground, the panellists found that customer behaviour has fundamentally changed.
“Customers now want to buy and scale, but they want delivery in six months, driven by the chip refresh cycle,” Boonstra said. “That creates a financing challenge – how do I get my money back?”
The result is a market in which operators are increasingly building at risk. Anne Jensen, VP of marketing at Verne, suggested that what’s needed is “infrastructure that actually scales with both the energy systems and the communities around it” – acknowledging that community engagement can be overlooked by the industry.
With incoming policies like the Cloud and AI Development Act coming into play, digital sovereignty became a centrepiece of discussion during the panel. They discussed that, as more regulations are formed, it becomes a question of whether legislation can deliver a framework that both protects the industry and is open to global innovation.
“Digital sovereignty sounds like a robust idea, but it has to recognise that you can’t be fully sovereign as long as you don’t have fully scaled, resilient, secure and up-to-date modern technologies,” said Tomas Jakimavicius, director of European government affairs at Microsoft.
“Building sovereignty only on the premise of ownership or nationality is a little short-sighted. Digital sovereignty will only succeed if it does not prevent innovation from coming to Europe.”
Trenor added: “Sovereignty requirements today are not so burdensome that they prevent providers from offering the best technology – and customer choice is super important.”
For the other panellists, the answer perhaps lies in both structure and ambition.
“For me, it’s not about winning the race on raw power itself. It’s about taking a truly holistic view of the data centre,” Stemmann said.
Jakimavicius offered another clear summary of what success could look like moving forward: “World-class infrastructure at scale. Reliable, sustainable energy. Talent and skills. And a clear, predictable regulatory framework.
“Combine those four, and I think we have a winner.”
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