Europe’s Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin (FLAPD) markets are on track for a record year of data center growth, while the Middle East pipeline has paused, analysis from JLL has found.

In its EMEA Mid-Year Data Center Report 2026, the real estate services firm said that, together, the FLAPD markets have reached a live capacity of 3.8GW, with estimates of a further 453MW to be delivered by the end of the year.

Paris was the leader in this growth, with 75.2MW added in H1 2026, already ahead of its full-year forecast.

Meanwhile, the pipeline in the Middle East is paused, with 2.6GW in development. Live capacity across the region has reached 1.6GW, with 13.8GW in the planning pipeline.

Despite regional conflict stalling completions, JLL said the Middle East is still likely to quadruple its capacity by 2030, with schemes being deferred, not dropped.

JLL said AI was the main driver of growth across EMEA, with high-performance compute workloads requiring larger sites, more power, and faster delivery times than more traditional data centers.

The real estate services firm said it expects the four largest hyperscalers to spend $725 billion during 2026, increasing capex by 77 percent Year-on-Year. The overwhelming majority of this investment will be directed towards AI and data center infrastructure, with JLL estimating AI workloads to account for around half of all global data center capacity by 2030.

“We’re seeing a fundamental change in how data center infrastructure is planned. Historically, operators built as close as possible to major population centers, but today’s growing AI training infrastructure follows a different logic,” said Assad Noori, head of data centers, work dynamics, EMEA, at JLL. “The determining factor is increasingly where sufficient power can be secured, rather than simply where demand exists. Data centers are being brought to where the power is, not the other way around.”

Despite rapid growth in the EMEA region, supply is still struggling to keep up with demand. Vacancy remains at 6.4 percent across FLAPD.

Power and land availability constraints are readjusting the development landscape, with greenfield developments now accounting for 39 percent of Europe’s future pipeline, compared to eight percent over the last three years, JLL said.

“Europe’s core markets will remain critical because enterprise demand isn’t going anywhere. However, hyperscale AI infrastructure requires a completely different scale of power and land,” said Martin Jensen, EMEA division president, data centers at JLL. “These requirements are accelerating investment into secondary markets, greenfield developments and entirely new locations capable of supporting the next generation of AI capacity.”