Summary
- Datacenter United has signed a binding agreement for multi-megawatt AI capacity at DC Machelen.
- Machelen is undergoing a 2026 cooling upgrade to support liquid cooling and higher-density workloads.
- The customer, contracted megawatt figure, rack densities, and commercial terms remain undisclosed.
Datacenter United has signed a binding agreement to provide multi-megawatt data centre capacity for artificial intelligence workloads at its Machelen facility in Belgium, where the operator is already upgrading cooling infrastructure for higher-density deployments.
The customer and commercial terms have not been disclosed. Industry reporting describes the agreement as covering several megawatts and says the planned environment will use liquid cooling to deal with the heat loads created by dense AI hardware.
The contract coincides with a physical upgrade already under way at Machelen. Datacenter United’s infrastructure roadmap shows design and engineering for advanced cooling completed in the second quarter of 2026, infrastructure deployment taking place during the third quarter, and installation and commissioning scheduled for the fourth quarter.
The company says the work is intended to support liquid cooling, improve power efficiency, and enable higher-density computing. That gives the agreement a clearer engineering basis than an “AI-ready” label applied to an otherwise conventional colocation site.
Higher-density accelerator systems change the demands placed on both mechanical and electrical infrastructure. More IT power can be concentrated into each rack, increasing the quantity of heat that must be removed from a smaller footprint and putting greater pressure on power distribution, coolant systems, redundancy, controls, and maintenance procedures.
Liquid cooling can move heat removal closer to processors and memory, but implementing it inside an established facility is not simply a matter of adding a different cooling unit. Pipework, coolant distribution units, heat exchangers, leak detection, controls, water chemistry, and maintenance procedures all have to be integrated around live infrastructure.
Machelen forms part of a broader programme across Datacenter United’s Belgian estate. The operator is also modernising cooling at Antwerp, expanding Oostkamp, and developing additional capacity in Ghent.
The portfolio has itself changed substantially. Datacenter United acquired data centre assets from Proximus, including facilities in Machelen, Evere, and Mechelen, expanding its presence around Brussels and creating more opportunities to retrofit existing sites as demand changes.
That retrofit route is likely to become increasingly important. Greenfield campuses can be designed around liquid cooling from the outset, but established European colocation markets contain large amounts of existing capacity that will have to accommodate conventional enterprise systems and much denser AI clusters at the same time.
Hybrid estates create their own operational complexity. Sites may have air-cooled halls alongside liquid-cooled deployments, with different temperature regimes and maintenance requirements sharing the same electrical and resilience architecture.
The Machelen agreement suggests that the operator has moved beyond speculative preparation and now has contracted AI demand behind at least part of its cooling investment. The precise scale remains unclear because neither the customer nor the number of megawatts has been published.
Installation and commissioning of the cooling infrastructure are scheduled for the fourth quarter. The next meaningful milestone will be the point at which that work becomes usable customer capacity rather than infrastructure still being fitted out.
