The European Union has an official goal to at least triple its data centre capacity over the next five to seven years. So, what do the executives responsible for delivering this new capacity actually think about that challenge? Can the industry deliver the power, compute, and community acceptance needed to get there?

Data Center World Europe in Vienna offered a unique executive insight into those questions when Apolo CEO Bill Kleyman led an opening keynote leadership discussion with three big industry names: Svein Hagaseth, CEO of Heim Datacenters, Amy Daniell, SVP Strategy and Development at STACK Infrastructure, and Christian Zipp, CEO of nexspace data centers.

Three key themes emerged from the discussion of whether Europe can scale digital infrastructure without stalling under its own ambition:

• Separating real, financed capacity from fantasy announcements and overstated power claims
• Embracing the growing importance of flexibility, funding, and workload mobility to unlock faster grid connections
• Committing completely as an industry to building trust with the communities hosting this infrastructure

Stop Counting Fantasy Megawatts – and Fantasy Green Power

The panel's sharpest consensus was that Europe's capacity crisis is, in part, a measurement problem. Hagaseth argued that the industry must abandon "announced capacity" as a credible and relevant metric, since most of those pipeline figures are aspirational rather than executable. And industry members need to apply that same discipline to how they talk about renewable energy projects and other sustainability efforts.

Here’s one illustration of this announced-versus-real pipeline problem: Norway, Finland, and Sweden together have around 25 GW of announced capacity, but only 860 MW under construction, and 470MW currently in operation. These are titanic differences in scale, leading to wild speculation on what really will be delivered and angst over the energy capacity needed.

Daniell clarified the definition further, making the case that real capacity begins at financial close: "Once a project has been financed, you can count it as capacity because it's got real money behind it.” Without such definitions, the industry can overestimate what capacity is feasible and overreact about the impact of projects that aren’t likely to happen. She illustrated the problem with a recent request for proposal from an American client requesting 200 MW of data center capacity by 2028, noting that nothing of that scale exists in Europe right now.

Zipp added that at the 5 to 15 MW scale, which nexspace data centers deploys, strong relationships with local grid providers have kept his projects largely free of power-related surprises.

When Kleyman pressed him on the early warning signs of a missed energization date, Zipp was direct. The trouble starts "when you're not really communicating in the right way and manner with your grid provider," he said, a reminder that capacity reality depends on strong relationships with local partners.

Renewable Energy Projects Deserve the Same Wary Eye

Similar scepticism extends to renewable energy project announcements. Hagaseth challenged the industry's habit of declaring "100% renewable" status purely through purchased credits, arguing that physical proximity to generation matters more than paperwork. "The electron goes the shortest way," he said, meaning a facility sitting next to a coal plant is not actually consuming green power regardless of what it buys on paper.

He pointed to Germany's decision to shut down nuclear plants and increase coal reliance as a case study in good intentions producing a worse outcome, while praising the Nordics' 96% fossil-free grid as a more honest baseline.

Hagaseth and Daniell agreed nuclear deserves serious consideration, including small modular reactors (SMRs), with Daniell proposing dedicated nuclear-powered industrial hubs sited away from population centres, built around clusters of heavy power users rather than cities.

The takeaway for operators? Credibility now depends on talking about commissioned, financed, and executable megawatts, and on being equally rigorous and transparent about what "green" power actually means.

Flexibility, Funding, and Workload Mobility Must Work Together

The second major thread centred on who pays for grid infrastructure, how flexibility can unlock faster connections, and whether workloads can simply move to where power already exists. All three panellists agreed operators should bear the cost of dedicated substations and grid reinforcement.

Daniell cited a €60 million substation bill in Norway that she accepted without hesitation, while Zipp described Germany and Austria's Baukostenzuschuss model, where developers directly fund dedicated grid build-out tied to their own projects.

However, funding alone isn’t enough, with flexibility becoming the new currency of faster connections.

Hagaseth pointed to new Finnish regulation granting grid priority to projects that create additionality, meaning capacity that benefits the broader system rather than just the data centre itself.

Daniell drew a parallel to the UK's Slough scheme, where data centres switch to generator backup during peak evening television ad breaks to offset nationwide kettle-boiling surges. Hagaseth noted Scandinavian grids face similar morning heating spikes, arguing that solving just two to three peak hours daily could meaningfully increase grid utilization from current levels.

This flexibility conversation led into a sharper debate about workload mobility and why compute cannot simply move to wherever power is available.

Hagaseth suggested that the industry can shift more than it assumes, pointing to latency data from Microsoft's first Nordic cloud zone showing that locations in southern Scandinavia fall within the 15- to 30-millisecond latency window for 70-80% of Europe. He argued the industry's fixation on the FLAP-D hubs (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin) is a strategic dead end given moratoriums and vacancy constraints in those markets.

Daniell raised the important practical staffing problem of "who is going to go and live there?" to operate remote facilities to the reliability standard her clients expect. She noted that building in remote regions often means constructing a small town to support the facility, and cautioned that the operational cost of attracting and housing workers can erode the benefit of cheap land and abundant power.

Zipp's colocation perspective reinforced this tension from another angle, explaining that enterprise and mid-sized customers in markets such as Germany and Austria want infrastructure within physical reach, prioritizing trust and control over pure cost efficiency, which keeps meaningful demand anchored in tier 2 and tier 3 cities rather than remote power-rich regions.

Trust With Communities Is Now Core Infrastructure

The third and arguably most urgent theme was community trust. Kleyman noted that roughly $200 billion in global data centre projects have been paused or cancelled due to community opposition, making local buy-in as critical as power itself.

Zipp framed this as a transparency issue, arguing that operators must proactively communicate with elected officials and residents before, not after, breaking ground. "It's a people thing, right? You have to talk to them," he said. Hagaseth went further, explaining why he named his company Heim, meaning home in German and Norwegian, a deliberate signal that community value cannot be an afterthought. He shared a cautionary example of losing a 120 MW Norwegian deal after a single vocal resident mobilized opposition based on misinformation.

Both executives pointed to measurable, publishable commitments as the path forward. Examples include publishing figures on annual waste heat reuse delivered back to local communities, investing in local apprenticeship and workforce development schemes, and engaging communities and grid operators before finalizing site plans rather than after.

Across all three themes, the panel's message was consistent: Europe will not triple capacity through bigger announcements or louder press releases.

It will take disciplined honesty about what is realistically buildable and actually green; genuine partnerships with grid operators and clients on flexibility and workload mobility; and sustained, measurable trust-building with the communities hosting this infrastructure.

Kleyman wrapped up the discussion by asking the executives to complete the sentence "Europe can triple capacity if we finally …"

Hagaseth’s answer: "Focus on the energy that is actually going to be energized versus the one that is promised."