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Germany now scores grid connection requests by project maturity, Poland has made waiting in the queue expensive. For data centre land, proof of readiness replaces the time stamp.

Of EUR 1.2bn in German data centre transaction volume in 2025, just EUR 140m involved completed assets. The rest was land. How the market solved its capital-inflow problem and created an exit problem.

Poland’s transmission system operator PSE is processing data centre connection applications totalling an estimated 150 to 200 gigawatts and has yet to sign one single connection contract.

A new wave of large-scale debt financings is turning data centres into a fully institutional asset class.

In late July, Warsaw formally threw its hat into the ring: Poland wants one of the seven EU-backed AI gigafactories while private developers are already locking in grid connections at gigawatt scale.

Berlin is easing efficiency requirements for existing data centres while tightening waste-heat obligations for new builds.

Warsaw’s grid bottleneck is pushing hyperscalers and investors to redirect capital toward Poznań, Katowice, Kraków and Wrocław.

EMEA has 12.5 GW of operational data-centre capacity in service and 78 GW in the pipeline. It is no longer demand but the grid connection that decides where capital lands.

A market worth USD 10.4 billion, but the bottleneck is not capital, it is megawatts. How congested grids and a new waste-heat mandate are reshaping Germany’s data centre investment market.