Europe set to fall further behind US and China on AI data centre capacity
TL;DR:
- A new ING report based on International Energy Agency data forecasts that Europe will add roughly 75% more data centre capacity by 2030, against a US doubling and China adding 2.5x current capacity. Europe already starts behind: China has 1.5x Europe’s capacity, the US about 3x.
- Ex-National Grid CEO John Pettigrew said the UK had over 30GW of data centre demand requests pending against a 50GW national system before he stood down — a scale that will reshape grid investment priorities.
- Resultsense view: the FT framing is “Europe playing catch-up” but the UK numbers tell a sharper story. A pipeline of 30GW of grid connection requests is more than half the entire UK system; whether the UK absorbs that demand or routes it to the US will define the country’s AI infrastructure posture into the 2030s.
The Financial Times’ Energy Source newsletter, written by Jamie Smyth in New York, set out the picture in a long piece on Europe’s AI competitiveness gap. Nokia chief executive Justin Hotard told Reuters last month: “The issue today is Europe doesn’t have the infrastructure” — a sentiment now echoed across European industry and policy circles.
Where the gap sits
ING’s forecast quantifies what European policymakers and industrialists have argued anecdotally for two years. Between 2020 and 2025, the US dedicated 34% of its €1.33 trillion (£1.18 trillion) in venture capital funding to AI; Europe allocated 18% of a much smaller €252 billion (£223 billion) pool. The European Commission’s own report, cited by the FT, concluded that “the scale, structure and distribution of AI funding remain fragmented and modest compared to key global competitors”.
The UK demand signal
Pettigrew’s 30GW figure — disclosed in an FT interview ahead of his appointment as senior adviser to a new AI infrastructure firm — is the most concrete indicator yet of how compressed UK grid capacity has become. He noted that demand from data centres came earlier in the US, partly because the federal government framed the build-out as a national security priority. The same lead-time advantage that the US enjoyed is now what Europe needs to catch.
What’s being proposed
A coalition of European technology CEOs — including ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP and Siemens — published an opinion piece this week calling for AI regulation simplification, competition and M&A reform to enable strategic consolidation, and accelerated implementation of the Savings and Investments Union to mobilise European capital. EU policymakers are also negotiating amendments to streamline the 2024 AI Act — one of which was finalised on 7 May. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has been the most vocal advocate of looser rules, particularly for industrial AI.
A new UK-relevant vehicle
Sandbrook Capital, an investment firm with nearly $5 billion in assets under management, has launched Krios Infrastructure, backed by a €200 million (£176 million) commitment to accelerate grid-secured land sites for large-scale European AI and data centre projects. Pettigrew is named as senior adviser. The firm targets 300MW–1GW capacity sites and aims to replicate Sandbrook’s US Cloverleaf Infrastructure model.
Looking forward
The UK’s Clean Power 2030 commitment and the National Grid’s strategic spatial energy plan will need to engage with AI-driven demand directly — the existing electrification scenarios were designed before LLM compute requirements ramped. Whether DSIT, DESNZ and Ofgem can move quickly enough to keep AI investment in the UK rather than redirected to US sites is the operational question for the next 18 months.