Europe’s total data center market will grow by 20 percent by the end of the year, reaching 13GW of capacity, research from CBRE has found.

Driven in part by new supply owned and used exclusively by hyperscalers, as well as neoclouds securing “record levels of capacity,” capacity growth in the region is intrinsically tied to AI infrastructure.

The hyperscaler self-build segment alone is expected to grow by 22 percent in 2026, reaching 4.3GW – the seventeenth consecutive year of double-digit hyperscaler self-build capacity growth in Europe, CBRE said.

Some 70 percent of this hyperscale self-build supply in operation as of Q2 is based in Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium.

Nearly 700MW of colocation and hyperscaler self-build supply, 352MW and 333MW, respectively, was delivered in Q2. Of this, 252MW (37 percent) was delivered in the Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin (FLAPD) markets, with secondary and tertiary markets accounting for the rest.

Neoclouds have also seen significant growth, with new signings for European colocation data center capacity for AI purposes quadrupling in the first half of the year. The volume of capacity sold to neocloud providers in this period rose to 420MW, up from 89MW during the same period last year.

Most of this capacity is being built and contracted in the Nordics due to their lower renewable energy costs.

CBRE said data center providers are becoming more comfortable with neoclouds, marking a change from two years ago, when providers were more hesitant to make such deals.

Take-up in Europe was 260MW in Q2, which CBRE said was unchanged from Q1. However, smaller markets now represent a greater proportion of demand, with markets other than FLAPD accounting for 55 percent of European take-up.

Despite record growth and an increase in availability across the region, vacancy rates remain low across Europe, and actually declined by 0.3 percent in the FLAPD markets.

The vacancy rate in the rest of Europe is forecast to reach 19 percent by the end of the year, mostly due to a larger proportion of data center stock for enterprises, which CBRE said is harder to let in its entirety.

Overall, demand continues to outpace supply, mostly due to a lack of available power causing delays in data center construction.