A new strategic framework governing the location, sustainability, and planning applications for data centers has been launched by the provincial government of Austria’s northeastern federal state of Lower Austria.

The regulations pertain to all projects announced after April 23, 2026. Any applications to build data centers before this date will remain unaffected.

DCD has approached the provincial government of Lower Austria for comment.

“When we talk about data centers, we are talking about one of the most important future planning issues for Lower Austria,” said the state’s governor, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, during a presentation of the new strategic framework at the Sankt Pölten State Parliament building. “We need this power from data centers, both in the private and professional sectors. We want to be the first federal state to actively manage this development.”

The new strategic framework, Mikl-Leitner continued, had been written to provide the sector with “clear rules, clear locations and, above all, clear priorities” for future data center developments in Lower Austria. This includes a new industrial zoning category for any projects larger than 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres). Facilities larger than 3 hectares (7.4 acres) will require developers to apply for a specific ‘location ordinance’ from the provincial government.

All applications, meanwhile, will need to include plans for an exterior and on-site power supply derived from renewable energy, as well as a heat reuse network.

New projects will also be clustered in so-called ‘acceleration areas’ on brownfield sites close to existing power and communications networks to minimize their environmental and societal impact.

The data center market is small in Lower Austria, which hosts three facilities run by Microsoft Azure as part of its ‘Austria East’ cloud region and another run by eww ITandTEL in Vösendorf, near the country’s capital of Vienna.

The new rules, however, could impact up to 100 new development enquiries Mikl-Leitner claims the state has fielded in recent months, projects that, if all of them were approved, would consume up to 3.4GW of electrical power – twice the state’s annual energy consumption.

The new strategic framework, added the parliamentary leader of Lower Austria’s governing Austrian People’s Party, Kurt Hackl, would allow the state to harness the clear economic advantages in approving new data centers while keeping the sector’s growth in proportion to the state’s available power supply.

Austria’s data center industry has reacted to the new strategic framework with skepticism. “The draft legislation is regulatory control, not a location strategy,” said the president of the Austrian Data Center Association, Martin Madlo, who went on to criticize the 0.5- and 3-hectare zoning thresholds as inappropriate and the other proposed rules for data center applications as introducing unnecessary complexity to planning applications for new projects.

“We would like to offer the state our cooperation and willingness to engage in dialogue, contribute our practical experience in order to jointly develop a future-oriented data center strategy for Lower Austria.”

Learn more about the data center market in Switzerland and the wider DACH region, and meet with other executives and experts at the DCN Zurich event later this year.