Power and Place: A Guide to Data Centre Developments

Data centres have become foundational infrastructure for the global economy. The sector is attracting investment at a scale and pace without modern precedent. Accelerating digitalisation, the computational demands of AI, and the strategic priority that governments now attach to sovereign compute capacity have together transformed data centres into pillars of national industrial strategy. Yet the regulatory and infrastructure frameworks that govern their development have not kept pace with that demand. A defining feature of the sector is a collision between the political and economic imperative to build at speed on the one hand, and the physical and regulatory constraints on the other. Congested electricity grids, lengthening grid connection queues, inflexible planning regimes, tightening environmental obligations, and an increasingly assertive foreign investment-screening apparatus are factors that ultimately determine whether, where, when, and on what terms a project can in fact proceed.

Prepared by the European Best Friends network, this publication maps those constraints and opportunities that accompany them across seven jurisdictions – France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom – together with the EU-level framework on which six Member State regimes build. It applies a common comparative framework organised around five principal themes that recur across the jurisdictions surveyed: (i) securing grid access; (ii) procuring power; (iii) national strategy, investment, and planning incentives; (iv) environmental regulation and sustainability; and (v) real estate and site structuring.