New capacity in the pipeline for 2026 to 2028 sits an average of 175km from major EMEA hub cities, up from just 46km for projects delivered between 2022 and 2025, according to JLL’s EMEA Mid-Year Data Centre Report 2026. Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin (FLAP-D) have more than doubled combined live capacity since 2019, from 1.8GW to around 3.8GW, but constrained grid connection queues in the core markets have made the traditional hubs an increasingly slow route to deployable capacity.
“These requirements are accelerating investment into secondary markets, greenfield developments and entirely new locations,” said Martin Jensen, EMEA division president for data centres at JLL.
The European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) forecasts cumulative investment of €176 billion between 2026 and 2031, but has warned that grid readiness, rather than access to capital, is now the primary limiting factor on how much of that pipeline actually gets built.
Spain leads the redistribution
Spain has emerged as the standout secondary market. Amazon has committed €33.7 billion through 2035 to its Aragón cloud region, expanding across Teruel, Huesca and Zaragoza, while Microsoft has separately pursued a data centre campus in the same region. Blackstone has pledged a further $5 billion to expand its Aragón project, adding to an original $8.75 billion commitment, with roughly 20 data centre projects now under evaluation in the region.
Bain Capital-backed Hscale has secured a hyperscaler contract worth more than $1 billion for capacity at its Spanish sites, and is developing further projects in Milan, London, Frankfurt and Zaragoza. July alone brought a string of new Spanish announcements, including Ferrovial’s €1 billion campus in Alcobendas and a €1 billion AI campus in Catalonia from Rubix Data Centers on a former chemical site.
Where else the wave is landing
Italy’s Lombardy region is drawing hyperscale interest, with QTS presenting a roughly 220MW campus near Milan worth up to €2.3 billion. In the Nordics, Pure Data Centres has committed an initial €1.5 billion to a Finnish AI campus scalable beyond 550MW, while Nscale and Nordkraft have formed a joint venture to run an AI campus in Narvik, Norway.
Portugal and the Baltics are also gaining ground. AtlasEdge recently launched the first data centre on its 30MW Lisbon campus, a move the company has linked to Portugal’s subsea connectivity and renewable energy position.
Croatia has emerged as an outlier. Pantheon Atlas secured approval from grid operator HOPS in July for a 1GW AI campus in Topusko, backed by 500MW of on-site solar and 8,000MWh of battery storage. Project partners have valued the investment at up to €50 billion, Croatia’s largest-ever private investment, though earlier company disclosures put the figure nearer $14.1 billion, and construction is not expected to begin until early 2027.
France stands apart as a core market that is thriving rather than being bypassed. Paris delivered 72.5MW of new capacity in the first half of 2026 alone, already ahead of its full-year forecast, a performance JLL attributes to the country’s nuclear-backed grid and EDF’s grid-ready development pipeline.
Power, not permits, is now the constraint
The shift has been driven largely by AI workloads, which require far greater power density and land than conventional enterprise deployments. Marc Ganzi has argued that secondary and tertiary markets with strong renewable resources are attracting unprecedented interest as a direct consequence.
Even so, delivery across the continent remains uneven. A BCS Consultancy report found that 93% of respondents expect continued data centre growth in Europe, but warned that securing power and planning approval is “no longer enough” on its own, with skills shortages and supply chain volatility now compounding delivery timelines.
Ireland illustrates the sharper edge of the problem. The Commission for the Regulation of Utilities introduced a tiered grid connection framework in December 2025, but new allocations in the Dublin area are not expected before 2027. Denmark went further. Grid operator Energinet paused all new large-scale grid connection agreements in March 2026 after receiving roughly 60GW of connection requests, nearly nine times the country’s peak electricity demand of around 7GW.
Some operators are attempting to route around the bottleneck entirely. Pure DC and AVK are developing what they describe as Europe’s first data centre microgrid at a Dublin campus, aiming to add capacity without placing further strain on the national grid.
The EU’s Data Centre Energy Efficiency Package, introduced in March 2026, is expected to test whether the shift towards secondary markets becomes structural policy or gets rebalanced through incentives for compliant developers in the core hubs.
Related stories:
- Beyond FLAP-D: Why Europe’s next wave markets are moving centre stage
- DC Byte on AI demand, power constraints and the next wave of data centre growth
- Marc Ganzi: Why power & AI will redefine the data centre industry
- Blackstone pledges $5bn to expand Spanish data centre project
- Data: Europe sees strong data centre growth, but delivery is unevenPure DC & AVK plan to deploy Europe’s first data centre microgrid
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