The first data center of a French data center operator was opened near Warsaw. By 2030, the market is expected to grow more than threefold. Land for data centers is already three times more expensive than for warehouses.
The first data center of a French data center operator and investor in this segment was opened in Jawczyce near Warsaw. The facility, with a capacity of 8 MW, is already in the startup phase and occupies over 2,200 square meters of net area, which refers to the clean usable area with dedicated colocation zones for customers. The gross area is 7,200 square meters. The campus will be connected to telecommunication fiber optic links with networks available in Warsaw.
“Recognizing the hosting needs in Central and Eastern Europe, we have identified Poland as an obvious market for further development. The importance of the Warsaw region in the data center sector is rapidly growing and may soon be as significant as Italy or Spain,” – says Olivier Micheli, CEO of Data4 Group.
The entire Data4 campus is being built on a 4-hectare plot and will consist of four buildings with a total net area of 15,000 square meters (35,000 square meters gross). The investment is estimated to cost 1 billion PLN. The construction of a campus with a target capacity of 60 MW will enable Data4 to focus on the Polish data hosting market as well as support the development of clients and cloud solution providers in Central and Eastern Europe. The opening of the first Data4 data center coincided with the announcement of the start of construction of another one.
“We are preparing to build a second center that will strengthen our Polish campus. We hope that the further implementation of the investment will better meet the needs…”
Data Center Boom
According to the latest forecasts by PMR, a consulting and analytics firm, the implementation of plans by the largest data center providers in Poland could result in a maximum increase in commercial data center capacity to over 400 MW by 2030, up from 120 MW in 2022. This is an optimistic scenario that does not take into account the typical staging of investment implementation in the market. However, if it materializes, Poland will have over 500 MW of data center capacity.
“Since wholesale data center customers such as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon have recognized the importance of Poland for the entire region, the market has rapidly accelerated and divided into two segments. One serves retail customers, including large ones such as banks, retail chains, streaming services, and grows organically. The other serves foreign wholesale customers and is driven by investments of significantly larger scale,” – says Paweł Olszynka, PMR analyst.
The list of data center service providers operating in Poland and targeting the wholesale market includes EdgeConneX, Vantage Data Centers, Data4, as well as operators previously known primarily for serving the retail market such as Atman and Equinix Poland. The market is highly fragmented, with the largest players holding a few to a dozen percent market share. Atman remains the leader.
Fairytale-like Land Prices
The presence of large foreign players also puts pressure on investment land near Warsaw, where the Polish digital valley of data centers is emerging. According to PMR, over 60% of the net area of Polish data centers is located here (around 10% in Krakow and 8% in Poznan).
According to Aleksandra Wołodźko, CEO of Greenfields, a land developer providing all necessary permits to developers, interest has more than doubled over the past two years thanks to foreign investors. The prices of lands with such purposes are also correspondingly higher. While logistics developers pay 200-300 PLN per square meter.
Nevertheless, purchasing plots is not easy. Investors of large data centers need, for example, 70 MW or more to make the investment profitable, and energy suppliers do not have the infrastructure to provide such connection capacity. Many companies have been waiting for a decision on this matter for two years, and some have received a refusal – says Aleksandra Wołodźko.
In her opinion, land owners often do not agree to such long reservation contracts despite the price being up to three times higher.
The article was published on the Puls Biznesu portal in polish version, under this link:
https://www.pb.pl/ruszylo-pierwsze-centrum-danych-data4-1186108