Interconnection queues, not land or capital, now pick Europe's data centre sites

CBRE published its European data centre update on Tuesday showing that of the roughly 700 megawatts added in the second quarter, only 37% landed in the five established markets of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin ^[1]. That leaves 63%, or roughly 441MW, going somewhere else ^[1], and the reason is not land price or funding cost but how long it takes to get an electron. CBRE attributes the shift to supply constraint, saying "Demand continues to outpace supply, mostly due to a lack of available power causing delays in data center construction" ^[2], and reports more than half of quarterly take-up happening outside the five cities ^[3]. The binding number is time. Connecting a new site in the congested core markets can take "10 years or more", according to RaboResearch analysts Owen Thomson and Coen Hutters, against waits they describe as significantly shorter in Belgium, Portugal, Spain, the Nordics and Italy ^[4]. Amsterdam is the extreme, with Dutch grid operator TenneT saying there is no additional capacity across much of Noord-Holland for the next ten years ^[5]. The Netherlands also bans hyperscale projects above 70MW of IT capacity or ten hectares across most of the country ^[6]. For anything with a 2027 or 2028 revenue date, that is a closed market rather than an expensive one. The other two anchors are on similar timelines. Frankfurt's central grid will not see meaningful upgrades until the 2030s, and West London substation work is unlikely before the early part of that decade ^[7]; Nscale's flagship Essex site has been unable to switch on ^[8]. The constraint is not restricted to the old core either. Denmark's Energinet paused new connections earlier this year after its queue reached 60 gigawatts against national peak demand of about seven ^[9], a queue roughly 8.6 times the country's peak load ^[2]. What replaces the core is cheaper only in relative terms. Prime powered land in Europe now costs 2.26m euros per megawatt, up 82% since 2021 on JLL's figures, with primary markets carrying a 2.3 times premium over secondary sites and four times over tertiary ^[10] - which puts the land bill alone for a 100MW site at about 226m euros ^[3]. European industrial power ran at roughly twice US levels in 2025 on IEA figures ^[11]. Developers are still moving: greenfield rises from 8% to 39% of the 2026 to 2028 pipeline ^[12]. The demand side confirms the redirection. Signings by AI-focused neocloud providers reached 420MW in the second quarter against 89MW a year earlier, a 4.7-fold increase concentrated in the Nordics, which CBRE attributes to cheaper renewable power ^[13]. Spain's installed capacity hit 439MW at the end of 2025, with industry body Spain DC forecasting roughly 2,537MW by 2030 ^[14], close to a sixfold increase ^[4], and Amazon committing 33.7bn euros in Aragon ^[15]. Nebius is building a 310MW, 8.5bn euro site at Lappeenranta in Finland, and Stargate Norway near Narvik starts at 230MW on hydropower with 290MW more planned ^[16]. Uniper has committed 5bn euros to repurposing old power plant sites whose grid connections already exist ^[17]. Ireland's reopening shows what re-entry costs. Its connection moratorium ended in December 2025, conditional on behind-the-meter generation sized to the full grid connection, siting in unconstrained locations, and 80% of annual demand matched by renewable investment in the country ^[18], in a market where data centres already draw more than 22% of national electricity ^[19]. The installed base has not moved. Hyperscaler self-build reaches 4.3GW across Europe, up 22% in a seventeenth consecutive year of double-digit growth ^[20], with around 70% of operational self-build in Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium ^[21]. Core-market vacancy fell slightly to 6.4% last quarter while the rest of Europe is forecast to reach 19% by year end ^[22], a gap of 12.6 points ^[5].