According to a foreign consultancy, the Greek data center market is expected to grow from 695 million euros in 2023 to 1.2 billion euros in 2029, expanding at an average annual rate of about 10%.
Analysts say the prospects for data center development are good. Greece is at the confluence of undersea fiber optic cables connecting Europe with Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The country is actively embracing the idea of cloud for data storage and has made great progress in the implementation of artificial intelligence, and authorities are encouraging investment in data centers.
Besides these positive factors, there are also some notable weaknesses: Building a data center remains a lengthy process: Data centers are one of the so-called “greenfield” investments, which means that they are mostly built on vacant land and there is a long bureaucratic process for obtaining building permits.
The study predicts that by 2029, around 70,000 square meters of data center space will be built in Greece. Currently, there are 14 data centers in Greece, and companies actively involved in data center planning and construction include Schneider Electric, Vertiv, AECOM, LDK Consultants, GEK Terna and Metlen.
Some of the largest investors (current or potential) include Microsoft, Google and Digital Realty, which is developing its fifth data center, Athens 5, due for completion in 2026 or 2027. By early 2025, it plans to complete the first phase of construction of Crete’s first data center, Heraklion 1, with a capacity of 6.5MW.
It is also building one of three Microsoft data centers in Spata Business Park near Athens International Airport, which will have a capacity of 19.7MW and is being built by a consortium including GEK Terna and Italian group Renco.
Google announced in September 2022 that it would develop three data centers in the Attica region, while Amazon Web Services is also planning its own centers.
Data centers consume a lot of energy: According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a typical data center requires 50 times more power than a comparable-sized office building. This raises the question of whether Greece’s power grid can power all the data centers that are built in the future.
