Bottom line: It is not a lack of demand or capital, but limited execution capacity in grid connection, skilled labour and construction firms that is delaying Europe’s AI gigafactories by years.
The EU is planning five AI gigafactories with €20 billion in funding, yet waiting times of seven to ten years for secured power connections in Germany are realistically pushing the start of operations to 2033 at the earliest. The public debate about demand and economic viability thus overlooks the actual bottleneck: a lack of execution capacity among grid operators, planners and construction companies.
With a funding volume of €20 billion, the European Union intends to build five gigafactories for artificial intelligence. However, given the current state of the German power grid, projects must expect waiting times of seven to ten years for a secured grid connection. Even if planning were to begin immediately, the first facility would not be operational before 2033 at the earliest. Industry representatives recently warned—among others in Handelsblatt on 10 May 2025—of overcapacity and insufficient economic viability for these projects. Market data contradicts this: according to the annual “Data Centre Truths” report by BCS Consultancy, which surveyed more than 3,000 industry participants from 41 countries, 93 percent of players expect demand to continue rising.
According to the report, the real obstacle lies not on the demand side but in operational execution. Fully financed and approved data centre projects with signed supplier contracts regularly fail at the same points: grid operators cannot meet contractually guaranteed power deliveries, late planning changes—for example regarding cooling technology—run into increasingly long delivery times for large-scale equipment, and established general contractors are fully booked while local construction companies lack the specialist expertise required for such projects. According to the report, a construction project in the Frankfurt area also failed due to a lack of dialogue with a local citizens’ initiative.
For executive management planning their own data centre or AI infrastructure projects in Germany or the EU, this means: capital availability and political announcements are not reliable indicators of implementation timelines. Realistic schedules must factor in bottlenecks in grid connection, skilled labour and approval processes—not just financing questions.
Two figures illustrate the growing imbalance between capital and execution capability: 95 percent of the experts surveyed by BCS Consultancy expect the supply of qualified skilled workers to continue declining, and half of developers already report milestone delays in ongoing projects. By contrast, according to the “State of European Data Centres 2026” report by the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA), investment momentum is rising significantly from €7.7 billion in 2024.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 20 August 2026
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