Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years
E-commerce giant has watts of bit barns to deploy but nowhere to plug them in
Amazon Web Services' European expansion has hit the buffers as the American cloud provider grapples with aging grid infrastructure and lengthy interconnect delays.
AWS has moved quickly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, said in an interview with Reuters this week.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in some European datacenter meccas, like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, this wait can extend to as much as a decade.
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This isn't unique to Europe. While a 2025 IEA report showed grid connection lead times ranging from one to three years on average across the US, in datacenter hot spots like Northern Virginia, they're also pushing [PDF] seven years.
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"We're finding more and more across Europe that certainty of the delivery date has continued to be delayed," MacDougall told the news wire.
These delays have forced AWS to reassess its European buildout.
An AWS spokesperson maintained that the company is continuing its European expansion, telling us via email, "Amazon continues to rapidly expand its infrastructure across Europe, with ongoing investments in edge locations and data center regions in more than 20 countries, as part of our global strategy of investing aggressively in capacity for our customers. During our Q3 2025 earnings cycle we shared that we've added more than 3.8 gigawatts of power in the prior 12 months, more than any other cloud provider, and we're on track to double our capacity again by 2027. Far from slowing down, we remain committed to expanding at pace to meet growing customer demand. As Europe works to decarbonize, grids must transform at pace, that's why we became a member of the Green Industrial Grids Association to accelerate modern electricity grids that power a clean and competitive economy.”
Power has become more of a problem for bit barn builders as the AI boom enters its fourth year. Since ChatGPT's debut in 2022, datacenter power consumption has skyrocketed, with typical rack densities jumping from 6-12 kW to upwards of 140 kW, with 600 kW systems slated to start rolling out next year.
Along with greater power consumption, AI workloads, particularly training, can be extremely spiky, with utilization jumping from just a couple of percent to 100 percent in a fraction of a second. This leaves grid operators and utilities tasked with serving these datacenters little time to respond to surges in energy demand.
The permitting process associated with grid improvements in Europe has also proven problematic, though regulation from the European Commission has been proposed to prevent this process from exceeding two years.
Further complicating matters, energy infrastructure remains in incredibly short supply with turbine manufacturers struggling to keep up with demand.
In response, cloud providers including Amazon have begun turning to alternative energy sources to secure power for their facilities. Amazon last year purchased Talen Energy's Cumulus datacenter campus next to a nuclear power plant, while Microsoft and Meta are also backing projects to reignite or extend the life of aging reactors.
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We've also seen a flurry of interest in startups developing small modular reactors (SMRs). These mini nuclear power plants could be deployed alongside datacenters if they can be made commercially viable.
With even the most optimistic SMR roadmaps pushing mass production out to the 2030s, a seven-year lead time on grid connections is probably the better deal for now. ®