The Power Behind AI – monthly data centre tracker: July edition

Research evidence excerpt

Accessible version

Pan-European Utilities Themes

The Power Behind AI – monthly data centre

tracker: July edition

Industry Overview

Translating project announcements into power estimates

Following our Data centre primer: the power behind AI from early December 2025, we

launch the seventh edition of our monthly data centre (DC) demand tracker to monitor

new projects in Europe. Each month, we track the latest announcements and, where

appropriate, factor these into our capacity and data centre power demand forecasts for

the most important European markets for our Utilities coverage, which account for

c90% of European data centre capacity today. Following Jul-26 announcements, we now

see data centres raising overall electricity consumption by ~6.5%.

Seventh edition: credible capacity goes on holiday

July delivered 22 projects, with total capacity unveiled near 2.3GW compared to ~5GW

in Jun-26. This slight decrease in announced capacity is mainly attributed to the lack of a

‘large’ project announcement this month (June saw a €45bn investment commitment

made by SoftBank to build 3 DCs in France – 3.1GW). As a result, July recorded capacity

still proved decent, ranking fourth for announced capacity in 2026. However, we note

that the credibility of the ~2.3GW announced in July was very low, as we decided to

make only ~0.2GW fall into our ‘High Confidence’ category. Within this category, we

highlight a 150MW AI DC project from Clearstone in the UK or a 42MW AI DC from

Aether in Strasbourg, France.

03 August 2026

Equity

Pan Europe

Utilities

Peter Bisztyga >>

Research Analyst

MLI (UK)

Noe Gonzalez >>

Research Analyst

MLI (UK)

Marcin Wojtal >>

Research Analyst

MLI (UK)

Alexandre Braunshausen, CFA >>

Research Analyst

MLI (UK)

DCs now on track to add c6.5% power demand by 2030

Glossary

The new announcements mean we see now data centres raising overall electricity

consumption by ~6.5%, equivalent to a ~1.05% CAGR 2024-2030E (~1.04% in previous

tracker). This reflects upward revisions to both our IT load capacity and associated

power consumption forecasts. In our High Confidence scenario, we now expect IT load

…