Europe’s data centre boom is spilling out of its traditional hubs, and Poland and the Baltic states are lining up to catch the overflow. 

Nearly two-thirds of the 685MW of new data centre capacity delivered in Europe in the second quarter went to markets outside Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, the five hubs known in the industry as FLAP-D, according to CBRE’s Europe data centres figures for the quarter. Developers are following the power: “demand is now driving a range of non-core markets, where scalable power is more readily available, often at a lower energy cost than in FLAPD,” the property consultancy said.

Central Europe starts from a low base. Warsaw, the region’s biggest market, had 150MW of live colocation capacity at mid-year, against 970MW in Frankfurt and 1,277MW in London, JLL said in its mid-year EMEA data centre report. But the cost gap is wide. Prime powered land in the FLAP-D hubs has risen 82% since 2021 to €2.26mn per MW of IT capacity, and primary markets now cost about 2.3 times as much as secondary locations such as Warsaw and four times as much as tertiary ones.

Meanwhile, vacancies across European data centres are heading for a record low of 6.5% by the end of 2026 even as a record 750MW of new capacity comes online, CBRE forecast in its 2026 outlook, because “bottlenecks in the electrical grid” limit how much can be built. In Frankfurt the wholesale vacancy rate was just 4.6% in the second quarter, and operators there wait years for power and permits.

Poland leads the region

Poland has become the anchor of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) market. Its commercial data centre capacity passed 200MW in 2024, more than a third of the CEE total, after more than doubling since 2021, and it could triple by 2030 if growth holds, engineering consultancy Cundall said in a June note. Warsaw holds about 74% of the available power, with Krakow, Poznan and Gdansk growing as secondary hubs, and more than 25 large projects have been announced.

WBS Power plans a 3.2GW campus in Choczewo on the Baltic coast, built in four 800MW phases, with the first data centre due online in 2028-2029, World Nuclear News reported in March. The site sits in the same municipality as Poland’s first planned nuclear plant at Lubiatowo-Kopalino, due in 2033, and WBS Power says it has grid connection conditions for the full 3.2GW.

Established operators are building in smaller steps. French operator Data4 opened a second 10MW data centre at its Jawczyce campus outside Warsaw in April, part of a planned 60MW site, and said it would lift its investment in Poland from nearly €200mn to about €600mn by 2030. Poland and Lithuania have also filed a joint bid to host one of the EU’s AI gigafactories, the large computing centres Brussels plans to co-finance.

Investors cite three advantages: land, a cool climate and a skilled workforce. Warsaw’s average temperature of 8.8C allows more “free cooling” than London or Madrid, Poland produces more than 80,000 STEM graduates a year, and its district heating network, the second-largest in Europe and connected to about half the population, could take waste heat from servers. Cundall reckons data centres could supply up to 16% of national district heating demand by 2035, in a blog post last October.

Betting on AI

Estonia has the most advanced AI projects in the Baltics. Finland’s Caverion is adding 22MW of IT capacity to the Greenergy Data Centers campus near Tallinn in a €50mn contract, taking it to 31.5MW, and its first AI section, with Dutch company Nebius as a tenant, is due by the end of 2026. Local investors have just raised their stake in the operator to 42.5%.

Renewables developer Sunly has proposed a €1.7bn, 180MW data centre at Risti in western Estonia, powered by its own wind farms and batteries, which would become the country’s largest electricity consumer. In Latvia, telecoms group Tet opened its DC7 data centre in Salaspils in September at 1MW, with plans to reach 5MW by 2032 and feed its waste heat into the town’s heating network.

The Czech Republic and Hungary have smaller markets but some price advantages. Industrial electricity cost €0.21 per kWh in Poland and €0.20 in Czechia in 2024, against €0.23 in Germany and €0.24 in the Netherlands, according to Eurostat data cited in a January commentary, which noted that both Poland and Czechia were in the running for EU AI gigafactories.

Hungary is making its mark more in hardware than in server halls. Its exports of AI-related products such as processors and computer equipment rose 42% in 2025, the EBRD said in June. ICT and defence group 4iG, which runs data centres, is setting up an energy arm and has signed a letter of intent with X-Energy on small modular reactors partly to power such facilities.

Can the grid keep up?

Power is the region’s selling point and its biggest risk. Poland’s grid is still coal-heavy, though the government targets about 72% of electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030. Transmission operator PSE has allocated capacity for up to 1.2GW of new data centres by 2034, Cundall said, while it is fielding connection requests from individual operators of 500MW, 800MW and even 1,000MW, law firm Baker McKenzie said in a July 2025 note.

“We are facing a migration of the data center business in search of clean and, above all, accessible and stable sources of energy,” said Agnieszka Skorupinska, a partner in Baker McKenzie’s Warsaw office. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has pitched Poland’s new offshore wind farms as a source of power for AI and data centres.

The Baltics face a different constraint. Estonia imports about 40% of its electricity from Finland and the other Nordic states, and Google’s €13bn data centre programme in Finland could raise Estonian prices by about €5/MWh by soaking up cheap Finnish power, Enefit board member Tiit Hobejogi has warned. The Nordics themselves are where most AI capacity contracted by so-called neoclouds is being built, CBRE said, and over half of Europe’s AI growth is expected in the Nordics and tier-2 markets, according to JLL.

Secrecy and security

The industry’s appetite for power and water is also drawing a backlash. On September 28 the Dutch investigative group Lighthouse Reports filed a complaint accusing the European Commission of shielding data centres from public scrutiny, Politico reported. A 2024 law bars Brussels and national capitals from publishing energy and water data for individual sites, and the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee will decide in November whether to take up the case.

According to Commission figures, European data centres used 20.7TWh of electricity in 2025, about as much as Croatia, and more than 8mn cubic metres of water, increases of 26% and 52% on 2024. From next summer operators will have to rate their energy efficiency, water use and share of green power on an A-to-G label, which Lighthouse Reports says still hides total consumption. The Netherlands, France and Ireland have already restricted new data centres over power supply, Baker McKenzie noted.

For the eastern flank there is a harder risk. Russia has begun targeting digital infrastructure in Ukraine, with missiles hitting Kyiv data centres in September, a reminder that the cheap land and power on the EU’s border come with a geography no spreadsheet can price.