An opinion piece in DCD by Johan Hernström, chief revenue officer at Alight, argues that Europe's data center constraint is delivery rather than generation. At peak times, he says, renewables produce more electricity than the continent can use, at historically low cost. Ageing grid infrastructure cannot absorb it, and battery storage is still insufficient at scale.
The major hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin are all reported to be hitting capacity limits. The piece cites an IEA estimate that around 20 percent of planned data center projects risk delay because of electricity supply bottlenecks.
The author points to solar as a warning. Capacity grew faster than grid investment, storage or local demand, so prices turned negative in peak solar hours and curtailment climbed. In Spain, about 16 percent of solar output was curtailed in the first quarter of 2026, double the year-earlier level. Investors also sold assets at a fraction of earlier valuations. In his view, data center buildout is repeating this pattern at higher speed and with higher stakes.
If grids cannot deliver, the piece warns, operators may turn to other sources. It cites Microsoft's 20-year deal to restart a US nuclear facility, Amazon's nuclear-adjacent campus in West Texas, and Google's small modular reactor commitment in Tennessee, with first power targeted around 2030. In the UK, more than 100 data centers have reportedly requested gas connections, sometimes as primary supply (The Guardian, 2026, as cited).
The proposed answer is the energy hub: solar generation, battery storage and data center load co-located and connected to the grid at one node, giving network operators a single manageable profile. The author cites a Duke University study finding that grids could take up to 100GW of new load without upgrades if large users curtail for less than one percent of the time.
He also cites an Irish case in which a developer, an energy company and EirGrid built a shared substation for a data center and an offshore wind farm, connecting both two years sooner. On the corporate side, Alphabet bought Intersect Power for $4.75bn in 2025, and Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft accounted for roughly half of the 56GW of clean PPAs signed globally that year.
Why it matters: The piece is an opinion from an executive in the sector, and its evidence consists of selected examples rather than a systematic test of the hub model. Still, the cited delay risk and curtailment figures suggest that grid planning, not raw generation, may increasingly shape where and how fast European AI capacity gets built.
TwinStack automated analysis, based on reporting by DCD. Check the original for full details.