Europe · AI compute
The large AI data centres under construction or announced across Europe, who funds and builds them, what the industry is actually short of, and where Windrose Park Antwerp sits. Public reporting of August and September 2026; capacities are announced, not built.
Circle area tracks announced capacity in megawatts. Dashed grey rings mark the five FLAP-D hubs, where grid connection queues run seven to thirteen years. Click any circle for the full record.
Split the projects on the map and only two funding shapes appear: hyperscalers building for their own use, and, more commonly, infrastructure capital funding a specialist developer who then leases to a hyperscaler. In nearly every project that actually got built, the anchor tenant came before the money.
| Project | Size | Developer | Who funds it | Tenant | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| START Campus · Sines 🇵🇹 | 1.2 GW across six buildings; SIN01 26 MW live, SIN02 180 MW in build | Start Campus | Davidson Kempner (US hedge fund), Pioneer Point Partners (UK infrastructure fund) | Microsoft in talks for up to $10bn, with Nscale | Former coal-power site: grid access secured, subsea cable landing, seawater cooling. Built with no subsidies. |
| Stargate Norway · Narvik 🇳🇴 | 230 MW rising to 520 MW; 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by end-2026 | Nscale | 50/50 JV Nscale and Aker ASA, about $2bn; first 20 MW phase about $1bn | OpenAI, its first European gigafactory; Microsoft rents Vera Rubin chips from Nscale | Entirely hydropower. Cheap electricity and cold air make cooling almost free. |
| Pure DC · Seinäjoki 🇫🇮 | Phase 1 110 MW (€1.5bn), expandable beyond 550 MW (€7.5bn) | Pure Data Centres Group | Oaktree Capital (Brookfield); €1.3bn of debt for phase 1 | Microsoft has signed for capacity | The largest UK investment into Finland to date. |
| Brookfield · Strängnäs 🇸🇪 | 300 MW rising to 750 MW; SEK 95bn over a 10–15 year build | Brookfield | Brookfield Asset Management | — | About 350,000 m² of land. Brookfield also sits behind Pure DC through Oaktree. |
| Kevlinx BRU01 · Brussels 🇧🇪 | 32 MW, 60 kW per rack, up to 150 kW liquid-cooled; 2.5 ha | Kevlinx Data Centers | Macquarie Capital (majority) with PMV, the Flemish public investment company, and its fund EPICo² | Multi-tenant colocation | Built on citydev.brussels’ Galilei site: public land, private capital, specialist developer. |
| Google · St. Ghislain 🇧🇪 | €5bn across 2026–27, plus 300 jobs | Own use | Belgium’s largest campus: canal-water cooling, no chillers, expanding since 2007. | ||
| Microsoft · Zaragoza 🇪🇸 | $3.4bn, construction from 2026, three sites in Aragón | Microsoft | Microsoft | Own use | DC Malpica is separately planned nearby at 300 MW. |
| Stargate UK 🇬🇧 | Paused | OpenAI / Nscale | — | — | Paused in April 2026 over energy costs and regulation. What stopped it was power prices and permitting, not money. |
Grid connection time, not money. Across the five FLAP-D hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, grid queues average 7 to 10 years and reach 13 in the worst places; AWS reports seven-year waits in Europe. A data centre itself takes 18 to 24 months to build. The result is that 63% of Europe’s new capacity is now going somewhere other than the big five, mostly to Iberia and the Nordics.
Waste heat with nowhere to go. The EU Energy Efficiency Directive has made heat a legal matter: any data centre above 500 kW of IT must report PUE, water use, renewable share and heat-recovery rate every year, Germany sets binding recovery shares, and Belgian cities such as Mechelen require tripartite heat contracts. Yet most data centres sit in out-of-town parks where nobody wants the heat. That is a siting problem, not a funding one.
Windrose Park Antwerp is not in the same race as Sines or Narvik. What it has is three things that rarely come together on one site.
The assembly hall needs about 810 kW of heat in winter, and the logistics warehouses next door need more. Compute pods on site turn waste heat into a resource without a district-heating negotiation.
Seven data centres in the city, the largest 3 MW, none under construction, while Belgium is named as a growth market precisely because its grid queues are shorter than the FLAP-D hubs’.
Skid-built compute pods and 20 ft Windrose Power storage units are not tied to a building, and they run on the same wind supply that powers the truck line.
Sources: Start Campus / Businesswire, Reuters (Microsoft–Sines), Nscale and OpenAI press releases (Stargate Norway), DatacenterDynamics (Pure DC–Microsoft, Kevlinx BRU01, AWS grid waits, Stargate UK), IPE Real Assets (Brookfield Sweden), citydev.brussels, Google press room, The Next Web (capacity leaving FLAP-D), Baxtel (Antwerp), UK Government and DataVita (North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone). Capacities are announced, not built. Map tiles © Esri, HERE, Garmin and OpenStreetMap contributors.