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EUROPE’ S DATA CENTRE MARKET ENTERS NEW STRATEGIC ERA OF AI HYPER EXPANSION AND ENERGY CONSTRAINTS
The European Data Centre Association( EUDCA) has announced publication of its 2026 State of European Data Centres Report.
Building upon regional benchmarks established in last year’ s report, the new data reveals a European market that has moved beyond the era of hub-centric development and is evolving into a distributed, energy-integrated and AI-driven digital ecosystem.
Europe’ s data centre sector is shown to be entering a period of exceptional expansion, structural diversification and rapid technological transformation, driven by AI hyper-expansion. However, its ability to fully exploit potential growth is threatened by energy availability and access.
The new EUDCA report finds European market growth not only within traditional centres, such as the Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin( FLAP-D), but also rapidly decentralising across Southern Europe, the Nordics, Central and Eastern Europe( CEE) and selected Tier 2 metros.
Moving from cloud-led growth to AI demand, data centres are now recognised as critical infrastructure underpinning Europe’ s competitiveness and security.
Europe’ s IT power capacity grew from 10,539 MW( 2023) to 14,784 MW( 2025), exceeding forecasts. Furthermore, € 176 billion in cumulative investment is expected from 2026 – 2031.
Within this growth and investment, scale colocation campuses and AI-optimised facilities dominate new builds. A CAGR exceeding 25 % through to 2031 is expected for scale colocation, reflecting rising demand for high-density cloud and AI clusters. Traditional retail and wholesale sites continue to expand, but their relative share of new capacity is declining as customers increasingly require multi-building, AI-ready environments with long-term scalability.
As demand for data centres continues to accelerate, driven by the rise of AI workloads and increasing rack densities, cooling is moving from the shadows into a central role.
Success in this environment, according to experts at Apx( formed from the dedicated data centre team at LFB Group – formerly Lennox), will be defined by greater agility, flexibility and closer collaboration across the design, development and delivery lifecycle.
The data centre division at LFB Group has formally rebranded as‘ Apx’, marking a strategic decision designed to reflect the growing complexity, pace and performance expectations of the industry.
LFB GROUP’ S DATA CENTRE DIVISION UNVEILS NEW CHAPTER AS REBRAND TO‘ APX’ REVEALED
The brand’ s next chapter, following more than 20 years supporting server room and data centre operations in Europe, focuses on embedding these themes into how cooling solutions are engineered and delivered, with coengineering and pre-commissioning both fundamental parts of its principle; an approach that is backed by the division’ s newlyenhanced facilities in Lyon, France.
Its complementary sites in Genas, Mions, Longvic and Burgos give Apx one of the few fully integrated, multi-site production and validation networks in Europe, enabling its team to frontload critical work thanks to its enhanced capabilities in precision manufacturing, automated testing, climatic validation and precision manufacturing.
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