Europe Wants to Triple Its Data Centres. Its Grids Have Not Been Asked Yet
The European Commission has set a target that would reshape electricity demand in parts of the continent, and it has done so in an industrial policy document. The AI Continent Action Plan, published on 9 April, says the Commission will propose a Cloud and AI Development Act with the goal of at least tripling the EU's data centre capacity in the next five to seven years, prioritising highly sustainable data centres. It also confirms plans for AI gigafactories, each with about 100,000 advanced AI chips.
The action plan has five pillars, and the first is computing infrastructure. The Commission says 13 AI Factories are already being deployed around Europe's supercomputers, to support start-ups, industry and researchers. The Commission describes them as large-scale facilities with approximately 100,000 state-of-the-art AI chips, four times more than current AI factories, integrating computing power and data centres to train complex models at unprecedented scale. InvestAI itself was launched by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the AI Action Summit in Paris on 11 February, with the aim of mobilising €200 billion of investment in AI.
The Commission's February release said the €20 billion fund would finance gigafactories through a public-private partnership it compared to a CERN for AI, drawing on EU programmes such as Digital Europe, Horizon Europe and InvestEU, with member states able to contribute cohesion funds. The Cloud and AI Development Act is the measure aimed at commercial capacity. In the IEA's base case, global data centre demand more than doubles to about 945 TWh by 2030. The Commission's target and the IEA's projection do not measure the same thing.
The Commission's emphasis on highly sustainable data centres points towards sites near abundant renewable or nuclear generation. The Cloud and AI Development Act consultation is the first opportunity to close that gap. The gigafactory call will show where consortia want to build and how they plan to power their sites.