Europe’s artificial intelligence ambitions face a hard truth: the region’s share of global data centre capacity is on track to shrink from roughly 13 percent today to about 10 percent by 2030. The culprit has nothing to do with weak demand.
Structural barriers make building AI infrastructure painfully slow across the continent. Grid connection wait times stretch up to seven years in some areas. Electricity costs remain stubbornly high. Developers must navigate a fragmented web of local planning rules and environmental regulations. Meanwhile, American rivals bypass grid bottlenecks entirely, deploying on-site gas turbines and reciprocating engines to power their facilities directly.
Roland Berger’s latest research points to three primary obstacles: power access, energy pricing, and regulatory complexity. The consultancy argues that subsidies alone cannot fix these problems. Faster grid connections, streamlined approval processes, and more predictable planning frameworks would deliver far greater impact. The UK’s Ofgem has already floated one idea, charging application fees to weed out speculative grid requests and speed up connections for serious projects.
Innovative energy configurations are starting to emerge. The Nordics and Iberia, blessed with abundant renewable electricity, are becoming training hubs. The traditional FLAPD markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin) still command strong demand, but new connections there prove significantly harder to secure. Technologies like battery storage, on-site generation, and flexible demand could unlock capacity in those congested markets.
Europe does possess real strengths. Its supplier base for power distribution, cooling, and gas turbines ranks among the world’s most sophisticated. Adjacent industries, including automotive and industrial manufacturing, bring capabilities such as 800 VDC technology that translate directly to data centre value chains.
The stakes extend well beyond infrastructure. Data centres form the foundation of the AI economy. Without competitive domestic compute capacity, European businesses struggle to scale, investment migrates elsewhere, and productivity gains concentrate in competing regions. Every year of delay widens the gap.
