Amazon Web Services is encountering grid connection wait times of up to seven years for new European data center projects, a delay that exceeds the usual finance and physical construction timelines by quite some margin.
This is according to Amazon’s head of energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, Pamela McDougall, who, in an interview with Reuters, said that timelines for getting a grid connection have become one of the biggest deciding factors in Amazon’s data center investments. "And we're finding more and more across Europe that certainty of the delivery date has continued to be delayed," she said during the interview.
Grid queues into the 2030s
McDougall says that AWS typically develops a data center in roughly two years, with connection queues in the U.S. averaging one to three years as per the International Energy Agency. In several European markets, however, such schedules are now subordinate to grid connection queues that stretch well into the 2030s. In Italy and Spain, even projects with land and permits in place are unable to secure firm delivery dates for grid connections, effectively freezing new capacity irrespective of demand.
Data center power demand has risen sharply over the past three years, driven by the likes of AI infrastructure and the higher rack densities it requires. Facilities that were once designed around 6 to 12 kilowatts per rack are now being planned around loads several times higher, with AI clusters introducing large, concentrated demand blocks that must be provisioned upfront by grids that were designed to accommodate predictable industrial and commercial loads.
The International Energy Agency has warned that procurement timelines for core grid components now routinely extend beyond two years for cables and up to four years for large power transformers. Even when regulatory approval moves quickly, actual, physical delivery might not follow until years later. This disconnect between construction timelines and grid expansion timelines has left transmission operators unable to respond at the pace hyperscalers like Amazon need to bring their new facilities online in a timely fashion.
Meanwhile, Europe’s data center electricity consumption continues to grow exponentially. Estimates by the European Commission place EU data center demand at roughly 96 TWh in 2024, with projections rising to 168 TWh by 2030. That growth is heavily front-loaded in AI-capable facilities, which concentrate power demand in ways traditional grid planning models don’t handle well.
Speculative capacity bottlenecks
The most severe bottlenecks can be found in nations like Italy, where grid operators have received tens of gigawatts’ worth of connection requests tied to speculative or early-stage data center projects. Similar patterns have been observed in Spain and parts of Northern Europe, with capacity being reserved several years in advance and without any sort of policing or enforcement against companies that sit on secured capacity without then proceeding to define or achieve construction milestones.
This capacity squatting creates a situation where grid capacity exists on paper but is, for all intents and purposes, unavailable. Projects that are ready to build are forced to wait behind projects that may never materialize, turning access to the grid into a race of who can get to it first, versus whose projects are actually ready to get moving.
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