Only 20 percent of datacenters are considered AI-ready across Europe and the Middle East, despite the growing demand for infrastructure to accelerate AI processing.
A report published by datacenter consultancy BCS says that AI-ready capacity in the region is limited, and there are a number of challenges facing the commercial property developers that want to build more, the biggest of which is a shortage of the right skills.
While the report expects AI-ready facilities to rise to around 70 percent by 2030, demand may still outpace available infrastructure.
These figures are drawn from more than 3,000 industry respondents across 41 countries, BCS says, in a bid to capture the constraints that are currently facing the delivery of new-build facilities across Europe.
The core issue? Most operational sites were designed for traditional enterprise or cloud workloads. Racks of power-hungry GPU servers demand far higher power densities, more robust cooling solutions, and greater operational resilience than these facilities were built to provide, BCS says.
This means that while many sites may have sufficient overall capacity on paper, they lack the ability to deliver power at rack level or manage the sustained heat loads AI infrastructure generates.
The 20 percent figure doesn’t signal industry failure, BCS says, but reflects how high the bar for AI-ready infrastructure has become, and how much of the existing estate was built for an earlier generation of demand..
The major headache for bit barn developers is the confluence of a number of well-known datacenter construction issues that increasingly occur simultaneously on the same projects.
Across much of Europe, there’s a shortage of available land to locate facilities, a dearth of materials and heavy equipment, difficulties getting connected to the energy grid, and a lack of skilled staff.
These are no longer isolated issues, but are increasingly felt together, BCS chief James Hart writes in the intro to the report. As a result, the industry is entering a new phase, where growth in the market is still expected, but the ability to deliver on that ambition is ever more constrained.
According to BCS figures, the vast majority of industry professionals polled (93 percent) expect to see rising demand for datacenter capacity over the next twelve months, yet available supply is forecast to shrink.
This ought to be a good position, but 95 percent of respondents expect the shortage of skilled professionals to worsen over the same period, and 86 percent report that supply chain volatility has become a structural feature of the industry rather than a temporary hitch.
BCS says half of developers have missed deadlines or client objectives due to skills shortages, and 53 percent indicate that supply chain issues will directly influence future site selection.
Firms that emerge strongest will be better organized, BCS believes those able to manage collaboration across teams, disciplines, and partners that don’t traditionally work closely together, and to navigate trade-offs under pressure.
However, despite the warnings, BCS says the UK market still has a potential pipeline for more than 10 GW of new capacity over the next ten years, while Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are tipped for more dramatic expansion this year.
London may even lose its place as the top European datacenter hub to Frankfurt by 2031, according to a separate report. ®