A new GIIA policy briefing paper explores long-term infrastructure investors’ crucial role in the sustainable and resilient expansion of Europe’s data centre sector. This is set against an ambitious EU target to triple capacity on the continent within five to seven years.
The paper highlights how GIIA members are applying the same long-term approach to data centres as they already employ across other critical infrastructure assets.
For investors with decades-long investment horizons, factors such as efficient design, renewable power procurement, water stewardship, heat reuse, and resilience are all essential to the long-term performance and value of their assets.
Case studies from GIIA members’ investments across the sector examine approaches to these determining factors – demonstrating how investors and their portfolio companies are adapting to a market where access to power and the project viability are crucial.
The geography of the European data centre market is also currently shifting. Power availability, land constraints and planning delays are increasingly affecting established markets such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin (FLAP-D). As a result, investment is now expanding beyond these locations to so-called ‘Tier II’ markets. This dynamic creates a greater focus on whether sites can be planned, powered and expanded reliably over the long term.
Private capital remains committed and structurally aligned with the sustainability and resilience outcomes Europe’s digital infrastructure requires, but delivery barriers remain the key constraint on investor appetite.
Grid connection timelines, permitting fragmentation across Member States, among other issues, are the practical barriers standing between committed long-term capital and operating infrastructure.
The message for policymakers is not that private capital is hesitant. It is that long-term institutional capital is positioned, committed, and structurally aligned with the sustainability and resilience outcomes Europe’s digital infrastructure requires.
Demand for data centres within the infrastructure asset class is only set to grow. With the right conditions in place, European policymakers and institutional investors can meet this together.