A growing wave of AI data center construction is pushing Europe’s tech developers into unexpected territory. Rural regions and smaller cities now attract billions in investment as power grids near major hubs hit their limits.
Real estate firm JLL reports that hyperscale facilities slated for delivery between 2026 and 2028 will sit an average of 175 kilometers from major urban centers. That marks a dramatic leap from 46 kilometers for projects completed between 2022 and 2025. The shift stems from vanishing land and power capacity in cities like London and Frankfurt.
Greenfield developments now represent 39% of Europe’s planned pipeline, up from just 8% of finished projects. Meanwhile, inner-city locations will shrink to 5% of upcoming builds, down from 13% previously. The remainder lands in industrial zones or on city fringes.
AI training workloads consume massive amounts of electricity and require water for cooling. Assad Noori, who heads JLL’s data center division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, put it bluntly: securing power now drives location decisions more than proximity to users. “Data centers are being brought to where the power is,” he said.
The four largest hyperscale cloud companies will spend $725 billion in 2026, up 77% from $410 billion this year, according to JLL estimates. By 2030, AI workloads could account for roughly half of global data center capacity.
DC Byte data tracking early-stage projects shows only one of nine planned gigawatt-plus facilities sits near a major city, namely Paris. The rest scatter across rural Spain, northern Sweden, and similar regions. While Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin remain dominant hubs, they face grid connection backlogs, planning hurdles, and scarce land.
Cost gaps prove striking. Powered land averages €2.36 million per megawatt of IT load in core markets. Secondary cities like Copenhagen, Warsaw and Milan come in at €978,000. Tertiary areas such as Bordeaux average €512,000, with some parcels dropping to €200,000. Amsterdam tops the list at €2.7 million, followed by London at €2.6 million and Frankfurt at €2.5 million.
Rupert Duckworth, associate director at Savills, noted that London’s cloud-driven development has already pushed land prices skyward while power constraints tighten across key cloud locations. As a result, the next phase of Europe’s AI infrastructure boom will unfold far beyond established tech corridors.
