Amid a growing capacity crunch, is Poland a potential sleeping giant about to see a boom in new projects?

At DCN Warsaw, an event run by DCD’s sister company Data Center Nation held last week, executives at some of Poland’s largest data center companies sang from the same hymn sheet on the country’s potential as a new data center market.

On stage, Sylwia Pyśkiewicz, CEO at Equinix Polska, Wojciech Stramski, CEO of Beyond.pl, and Sławomir Koszołko, CEO of Atman, noted that Poland has some 140 data centers totaling around 200MW.

That equates, they said, to around one percent of global capacity. Poland, however, should have more than just 200MW of capacity, given the size of the country, its economy, its population, and location in Eastern Europe.

During follow-on talks with DCD, the idea that Poland’s historically coal-reliant grid was off-putting for potential customers concerned about their carbon footprint was repeated by many that we spoke to. The country's energy sector, however, is undergoing a massive transformation, and is weaning itself off fossil fuels.

Poland has added tens of gigawatts of renewable capacity in recent years. The country is targeting 51 percent of renewable electricity generation and 64GW of renewable capacity by 2030, reaching 69 percent renewables by 2040.

Progress has been tangible. Renewable electricity generation actually exceeded coal-fired generation for the first time in June 2025. Natural gas capacity has also increased. Energy storage projects haven’t followed at the same pace as solar, but more and more projects are being developed, with gigawatts of storage capacity due to come online in the coming years.

The country is also developing its first nuclear power plant. Construction is due to start in 2028, and could come online sometime between 2036 and 2040. A second plant is also being planned, and the two sites could total 9GW.

Stramski said people had previously disregarded Poland as a potential destination because of its past grid issues, but are now becoming much more comfortable with the idea of investing in the country because of its new power story. Power prices are still higher than some competing markets, but there is hope they could come down further as the country continues its grid modernization efforts.

“If you haven’t placed your bet on Poland yet, you should,” said Stramski.

The Polish transmission system operator, Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne, is making major investments into the country’s energy grid, and has a dedicated data center strategy aiming to accommodate digital infrastructure and avoid the kinds of capacity issues (and occasional moratoriums) seen elsewhere.

Time to market was also highlighted as a major benefit of siting in Poland, with projects potentially able to get permitted and connected to the grid in three or four years in some locations. Locations outside Warsaw especially were seen as having potential for gigawatt-scale developments.

There is at least another 600-800MW of data center capacity in development, though that number could be much higher if all the announced and planned projects come to fruition.

Agnieszka Jankowska, a director at CBRE in Poland, told DCD that there are some 60 projects across Poland at various stages of development, ranging from tens of megawatts right up to more than 1GW. CBRE, however, is more cautious in its market predictions, as many of these are still in their very early phases of development.

Recent months have seen companies such as Energa Obrót, Polcom, Twenty20 Energy, LVL Energy, Budimex, Cisco, DL Invest & Boosteroid, Switch Datacenters, and 1911 DC announce plans for new facilities across the country.

Poland even has its own gigawatt-scale project in the pipeline. WBS Power, an offshoot of the Polish renewable energy firm PST Solartechnik, is targeting a 3.2GW project known as the Baltic Data Center Campus outside Gdańsk in Choczewo.

In interviews, DCD was told that Poland could not only continue to be a colocation hub serving the needs of both Poland and the surrounding countries, but also be a place where international cloud and AI firms could place training and inference clusters. Most the incumbent cloud hyperscalers are present in Warsaw, and there is the expectation that they will likely look at adding more AI capacity in the country as they continue their build-outs globally.

Piotr Kowalski, head of innovation at Beyond.pl and MD of the Polish Data Center Association, went to far as to say he believes his company could grow to become a rare example of a Polish data center and cloud firm that could grow internationally into other markets.

As with many markets globally, however, not everything is quite as rosy at ground level. Some local governments have sought to block projects, and residents in some municipalities have looked to push back against developments in their area. Developers will need to tread carefully if Poland is to realize its potential as a major data center hub to rival the likes of Finland and Spain.

One way the industry could get people onside is by utilizing waste heat. Poland had one of the largest district heating networks in Europe, with thousands of miles of heating networks across the country serving millions of offtakers. Like its energy grid, however, much of the heat is still generated via fossil fuels, so data centers could well find ready customers for heat in the country. There have already been a few smaller examples of data centers in Poland connecting to local heating networks, but there is potential for more as new compute capacity is built out.

The Russian elephant in the room

The ongoing conflict in neighboring Ukraine saw little airtime at the sessions and talks DCD attended. Executives framed fears over Russia as in the past and largely calmed down.

Whether international firms might in reality be put off by data centers in both Ukraine and Russia being repeatedly bombed in recent weeks, ground station sites in Poland and Bulgaria being set on fire, and a communications tower in Moldova struck by a wayward drone, however, is another matter.

Interviews from the DCN Warsaw video studio will be going live in the coming weeks. View them and many other interviews from our events here.