A Good Chance for Old Europe

The 3 November midterms put America’s plans for AI infrastructure under pressure. As I have argued before, voters’ concerns, and their limited appetite for the concentration of power and unchecked freedom of action granted to Big Tech under the Trump administration, played a part in the result.

According to Cleanview, the US has 1,415 data centres in operation, 542 under construction and 2,523 in the planning pipeline. In at least forty jurisdictions across ten states, residents voted on bans and restrictions. Only in Harwood, North Dakota, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, was a proposal to impose limits rejected. In Ohio, fourteen municipalities approved restrictions, while Texas, Georgia and Ohio - three major centres of data-centre expansion - elected governors who have promised moratoria (AGI).

The more dispassionate reading is one of friction, not reversal. Heather West of Eurasia Group expects projects that have already secured permits or entered construction to proceed, while the next round of planning will take a hit. But if plans slow down, demand does not stop growing.

And demand for AI is global. In the United Kingdom, a working paper based on millions of bank accounts found that 5.1% of adults were paying out of pocket for an AI assistant subscription in June 2026. The chart shows the share roughly doubling each year since 2024. That tells us something about where the pressure will fall: a European data centre can serve a user in Chicago just as readily as one in Lisbon.

Europe now has a chance to reclaim a role in artificial intelligence, taking advantage of a possible slowdown in US infrastructure investment. It also has an opportunity to offer something different from the light-touch approach to regulation and oversight encouraged by the Trump administration: infrastructure built around clearer rules, accountability and public safeguards.

European capacity is not ready to meet that opportunity. That sets the size of the window. In Italy, applications for grid connections add up to about 95 GW, more than the country’s peak electricity demand of 55–60 GW. Yet by the end of March, only twelve applications, totalling 1.3 GW, had reached the final design stage. These are places in a queue, not data-centre sites. Meanwhile, the EU call for AI gigafactories has been postponed to 3 December for large facilities and 4 February 2027 for medium-sized ones.

Germany has both a growth strategy and a public debate already under way. On 18 March, the federal government adopted a non-binding national strategy aiming to at least double data-centre capacity by 2030 and quadruple capacity for AI and high-performance computing, with priority for European companies. The law firm analysing the strategy describes it as, above all, a statement of intentions. On 6 and 7 November, the Stop Dirty Data Centres initiative, which calls for an immediate moratorium on large European data centres, brought activists onto the streets of London, Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin in what it described as the first pan-European mobilisation of its kind. Public opposition is taking shape before much of the infrastructure it opposes is even built.

Finland offers a warning of what not to do. At Muhos, Google cut down some 250,000 trees across 330 hectares. In early October, Finnish authorities ordered work suspended because the environmental impact assessments had not been completed before the clearing began. Google’s head for Finland apologised, saying he had acted on what he understood to be the best available interpretation of the rules. Anyone who works on systems knows the sequence: you check before release, and in production you pay the bill. A European site that follows that order offers investors something the US vote is now putting at risk: predictability.

Most of the work lies outside the server room, in construction and across the supply chain. At Saline, Michigan, projections promise 2,500 construction jobs and 450 permanent positions for a facility expected to reach about one gigawatt. A local resident considers those estimates highly optimistic. The actual work is in electrical installations, cabling, cooling and maintenance. These jobs, and the conditions under which they are performed, depend on the rules governing the project. In Europe, those rules are shaped by a tradition of labour protection and social welfare shared, in different forms, across the European Union. Elsewhere, labour and safety standards differ, and construction can cost less partly because of those differences.

The window has a clock, and Washington keeps one too. At Saline, the town council had rejected a zoning change. The developer sued, and a settlement followed within about a month. Construction is now under way. Trump has since suggested that companies should pay “dividends” to local communities. Every deal that clears an obstacle of this kind narrows Europe’s room to manoeuvre. The opportunity is real, but time is short.

Across the Atlantic, governments that seek to restrain Washington’s approach are often dismissed as representatives of “old Europe”. But Europe has something more substantial than a label: a model of work and social protection that its citizens recognise and expect. Giving the machine an address means deciding where it sits, who builds it and under what rules. A machine without an address goes wherever permits are cheapest, taking on the character of the place that hosts it. The people who use it every day will live with the consequences of that choice, even when they cannot see it.