Summary
- Polcom plans up to 40MW of capacity at its proposed Data Center 3 facility in Skawina.
- Six server rooms are planned, with rack densities of up to 150kW and air, liquid, and hybrid cooling.
- The project carries an estimated PLN150m budget and is targeted for commissioning in 2030.
Polcom is planning a data centre of up to 40MW in Skawina, near Kraków, as the Polish operator prepares its infrastructure for denser AI compute and a larger domestic cloud platform.
The proposed Data Center 3 development is expected to contain six server rooms and is being designed for power densities of up to 150kW per rack. Investment is estimated at around PLN150 million, with commissioning planned for 2030.
The underlying project details were published on 18 September rather than first announced on 22 September. Subsequent international coverage brought the scheme into the current news cycle, but the chronology is important: this is an already disclosed expansion plan rather than a newly launched project.
Polcom expects the facility to support air, liquid, and hybrid cooling. That combination would allow conventional enterprise infrastructure and higher-density accelerator systems to operate within the same development rather than requiring the entire site to adopt one thermal architecture.
A design target of 150kW per rack puts the highest-density areas well beyond conventional enterprise deployments. At that level, power delivery, coolant distribution, controls, and heat rejection become central parts of the rack design rather than secondary facility systems.
Liquid cooling can deal with much greater heat flux at the processor level, although the heat still has to be transported away from the data hall and rejected by the wider mechanical plant. The final efficiency of a liquid-cooled deployment therefore depends on more than the cold plate or coolant distribution unit installed beside the rack.
Polcom has already been investing in the supporting infrastructure around its existing estate. Reporting on the project says the company invested PLN42 million between 2024 and September 2026 in IT and energy infrastructure, including AI systems, backup generation, and a 1.7MW photovoltaic installation.
The company operates existing facilities at Skawina and Alwernia and is developing Polcom AI Cloud around infrastructure intended to keep customer data, models, and training environments under Polish jurisdiction.
That sovereignty proposition gives the project a commercial angle beyond raw GPU capacity. Financial services, public bodies, industrial companies, and other regulated users can have procurement requirements around data location, legal jurisdiction, and operational control.
Keeping workloads in Poland does not remove the physical constraints of supplying them. A 40MW data centre still requires a credible grid connection, substantial standby power, high-density electrical distribution, mechanical infrastructure, and a construction programme capable of delivering those systems in sequence.
The 2030 commissioning target also shows the mismatch between the rapid growth of demand for AI services and the much slower process of building significant new infrastructure. Four years leaves time for planning, utility work, procurement, and phased construction, but technology specifications are also likely to change during that period.
Designing for multiple cooling approaches gives Polcom some flexibility as rack densities evolve. The next hard milestones will be planning, power delivery, and construction rather than the launch of another cloud service.
