Summary
- BloombergNEF forecasts EMEA installed data centre power capacity rising from 19.2GW in early 2026 to 53.1GW by 2035.
- The UK is projected to remain the region’s largest national market at 7.7GW, ahead of Germany at 5.1GW.
- UK and Spanish pipelines contain particularly large shares of early-stage projects associated with first-time developers.
The UK is expected to remain Europe’s largest national data centre market through 2035, but a significant part of its development pipeline still carries execution risk around permitting, developer experience, and power delivery, according to a new BloombergNEF outlook.
BloombergNEF forecasts total installed data centre power capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa reaching 53.1GW by 2035, up from an estimated 19.2GW in the first quarter of 2026.
The UK is projected to account for 7.7GW by 2035, ahead of Germany at 5.1GW. Spain and Finland are expected to move up the regional rankings as projects currently at earlier development stages begin to enter service later in the decade.
BNEF’s 53.1GW figure represents peak installed power capacity rather than typical electricity use. Its modelling puts average data centre power draw across the region at 28GW in 2035, equivalent to around 246TWh of annual electricity demand.
Pipeline scale is not the same as delivery
The difference between peak installed capacity, average consumption, and projects still in development is central to interpreting the forecast. Europe has accumulated a large announced data centre pipeline, but grid connection, permitting, financing, and contractor delivery determine how much of that becomes operating infrastructure.
BNEF identifies the UK and Spain as the European markets where first-time developers account for an especially large share of early-stage projects that have yet to secure development permits. The research group considers projects led by inexperienced developers more exposed to delays or cancellations.
That does not mean those projects will fail. It does mean their headline megawatt figures should not be treated as equivalent to capacity under construction or already connected to the grid.
The UK has attracted major data centre proposals at the same time as power access has moved higher up the government’s infrastructure agenda. BNEF notes that both the UK and France have accelerated aspects of their grid-connection processes as governments attempt to reconcile digital-infrastructure investment with electricity-system constraints.
Other countries are taking a different approach. Spain and Denmark have considered rules intended to help prevent data centres from taking connection capacity that could otherwise support conventional industry.
Those policy differences can alter the practical geography of European data centre investment. Land costs and fibre remain important, but a project that can obtain a credible power connection in one country may progress faster than a theoretically stronger location where the transmission queue is blocked.
EU capacity ambition runs ahead of the pipeline
BNEF also expects the European Union to fall short of its stated ambition to triple computing capacity by 2030 under the Cloud and AI Development Act framework.
Its analysis estimates EU IT capacity at 9.1GW at the end of 2026 and 16.3GW in 2030. BNEF calculates that tripling the 2026 level would imply roughly 27.4GW, leaving a wide gap between the current pipeline and the political ambition.
By 2035, BNEF expects EU IT capacity to reach 26.4GW, much closer to that implied target. Additional projects could close the remaining gap, but the timescale reinforces how slowly large data centre campuses move from an investment announcement through grid, planning, construction, and commissioning.
The composition of demand also differs from the US. BNEF estimates AI training could represent about 5% of EMEA data centre capacity in 2035, compared with 14% in the US. That suggests European growth will continue to include a broader mix of cloud, colocation, enterprise, sovereign, inference, and other workloads rather than being driven by AI training alone.
For the UK, the headline position is therefore strong but conditional. A 7.7GW market by 2035 would preserve its leading European position, yet the path depends on whether early-stage projects secure planning, whether newer developers can execute, and whether electricity infrastructure is delivered at the pace required by the development pipeline.
The forecast reinforces a distinction increasingly visible across the sector: announced capacity may describe demand and ambition, but energised capacity is the measure that determines what operators can actually sell.
