The industry in 2026 will need to get ready for hyper-dense gigawatt-scale data centers but preparation will be more complicated than purely infrastructure design. AI’s exploding computational demand is pushing designers to deliver facilities with greater density that consume a growing volume of power and challenge conventional cooling. 

Demand for data center capacity in Europe will shift up another gear in 2026 due to a combination of ongoing pressures and new trends. With the expected breakout of AI inference, the emergence of agentic AI and ongoing demand for general cloud computing, the data center industry is likely to grow at its fastest rate yet.

The gift horse that drove cloud growth is a Trojan for AI. The cloud scale-out model of old paved the way for today’s epic deployments. But this model succeeded in a world defined by stable technology advancements and commodity server architectures