Amazon Net Companies’ European enlargement has hit the buffers because the American cloud supplier grapples with growing older grid infrastructure and prolonged interconnect delays.
AWS has moved shortly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute cloth, however whereas it could take two years to carry a brand new datacenter on-line, securing energy for the services can take as much as seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads power markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, mentioned in an interview with Reuters this week.
In line with the Worldwide Vitality Company (IEA), in some European datacenter meccas, like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, this wait can lengthen to as a lot as a decade.
This is not distinctive to Europe. Whereas a 2025 IEA report confirmed grid connection lead occasions starting from one to a few years on common throughout the US, in datacenter scorching spots like Northern Virginia, they’re additionally pushing [PDF] seven years.
“We’re discovering increasingly more throughout Europe that certainty of the supply date has continued to be delayed,” MacDougall instructed the information wire.
These delays have pressured AWS to reassess its European buildout.
Energy has develop into extra of an issue for bit barn builders because the AI growth enters its fourth yr. Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, datacenter energy consumption has skyrocketed, with typical rack densities leaping from 6-12 kW to upwards of 140 kW, with 600 kW techniques slated to begin rolling out subsequent yr.
Together with larger energy consumption, AI workloads, significantly coaching, will be extraordinarily spiky, with utilization leaping from simply a few % to 100% in a fraction of a second. This leaves grid operators and utilities tasked with serving these datacenters little time to reply to surges in power demand.
The allowing course of related to grid enhancements in Europe has additionally confirmed problematic, although regulation from the European Fee has been proposed to forestall this course of from exceeding two years.
Additional complicating issues, power infrastructure stays in extremely brief provide with turbine producers struggling to maintain up with demand.
In response, cloud suppliers together with Amazon have begun turning to different power sources to safe energy for his or her services. Amazon final yr bought Talen Vitality’s Cumulus datacenter campus subsequent to a nuclear energy plant, whereas Microsoft and Meta are additionally backing tasks to reignite or lengthen the lifetime of growing older reactors.
We have additionally seen a flurry of curiosity in startups creating small modular reactors (SMRs). These mini nuclear energy vegetation might be deployed alongside datacenters if they are often made commercially viable.
With even essentially the most optimistic SMR roadmaps pushing mass manufacturing out to the 2030s, a seven-year lead time on grid connections might be the higher deal for now.
The Register reached out to Amazon for touch upon the way it plans to deal with these grid challenges; we’ll let you understand if we hear something again. ®
