TL;DR: Hyperscale AI data centres coming online in Europe between 2026 and 2028 will average 175km from a major hub, against 46km for those delivered over the previous three years, according to JLL data seen by Reuters. Greenfield sites now make up 39% of the pipeline where they accounted for just 8% of completed projects.
The driver is straightforward. AI training campuses need enormous electricity and water for cooling, and the traditional hubs cannot supply either quickly enough. Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam and the Frankfurt-London pair are still the biggest markets, and demand there has not softened, but land is scarce, planning is restrictive and grid connections take years. JLL’s EMEA data centre head, Assad Noori, put it plainly: siting now follows available power rather than demand, so the buildings go to the electricity instead of the other way round.
The price gradient explains the rest. Bordeaux and comparable tertiary locations charge around €512,000 for each megawatt of IT load the land can power, dipping as low as €200,000. Milan, Warsaw or Copenhagen roughly double that, at €978,000. The established hubs average €2.36m — nearly five times the tertiary figure — with Frankfurt at €2.5m, London €2.6m and Amsterdam dearest of all at about €2.7m. Rupert Duckworth of Savills noted that London’s earlier cloud-driven buildout, plus rival property uses bidding for the same sites, drove prices up before power became the binding constraint.
Separate figures from DC Byte point the same way: of nine proposed gigawatt-scale European projects, only one sits near a major city. The others are scattered from the Spanish countryside up to northern Sweden. JLL expects the four largest hyperscale cloud providers to spend $725bn during 2026, up 77% on last year’s $410bn, and reckons AI could be running roughly half the world’s data-centre capacity by 2030.
For UK readers this is the frame behind stories Resultsense has covered locally. Scottish ministers recently sought sight of large data centre applications, and Lanarkshire’s AI growth zone drew £300m. Those are not isolated regional decisions — they are Britain’s share of a continent-wide relocation, which is also why the objections tend to arrive together: jobs and investment for areas that want both, set against habitat loss and the contest over water and electricity.
Looking forward: Inner-city sites are forecast to shrink to 5% of the pipeline, down from 13%. Expect planning disputes to follow the money outward, into rural authorities with far less experience of assessing energy-intensive infrastructure than the cities that handled the last wave.