More data centers planned
According to a foreign consultancy, the data center market in Greece is expected to grow in value from €695 million in 2023 to €1.2 billion in 2029, expanding at an average pace of nearly 10% annually.
The prospects for the development of data centers are good, the analysts say. Greece sits at the confluence of undersea fiber-optic cables that connect Europe with Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The country has eagerly adopted the idea of the cloud for data storage; there is significant progress in adopting artificial intelligence and investments in data centers are encouraged by authorities.
Next to these positive factors, there are some marked weaknesses. Building data centers remains a time-consuming process: Data centers are among so-called “greenfield” investments, that is, they are being built mostly on empty land and the bureaucratic processes to get building permits are lengthy.
The study predicts that the data centers to be built in Greece by 2029 will have an area of around 70,000 square meters. Currently, there are 14 data centers in the country and companies actively involved in data center planning and construction include Schneider Electric, Vertiv, AECOM, LDK Consultants, GEK Terna and Metlen.
The biggest investors, actual or prospective, include Microsoft, Google and Digital Realty. The last named is developing Athens 5, its fifth data center, with completion timeline set for 2026 or 2027. By early 2025, it will have completed the first phase of construction of Heraklion-1, its first data center on Crete, with a capacity of 6.5 MW.
Also under construction is one of the three Microsoft data centers, located at the Spata Business Park near Athens International Airport. Built by a consortium including GEK Terna and Italian group Renco, it will have a capacity of 19.7 MW.
Google had announced in September 2022 that it would develop three data centers, all in the Attica region; also planning its own center is Amazon Web Services.
Data centers are intense consumers of energy: A typical data center needs 50 times more electricity than a similarly-sized office building, the US Department of Energy says. Given that, there are questions about the capacity of the Greek power grid to serve all the prospective data centers.
