The data center market across EMEA saw slow but steady growth in the first quarter of this year, according to a report from JLL.

The company's Q1 2025 data center report showed that growth rates in supply, take-up, and pre-lets were slower quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year (YoY). According to the report, the quarter was constrained by power availability and tariff-related supply chain shocks.

JLL said that take-up was particularly affected by Microsoft and AWS, which slowed down the signing of data center leases because of "growing economic uncertainty and disrupted global supply chains."

But both companies have been hesitant to describe their actions in these terms, instead framing their respective pull-backs from some deals as 'business as usual.'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's Q3 2025 earnings call that "[Microsoft has] always been making adjustments to build, lease, what pace we build all through the last 10, 15 years, it's just that you all pay a lot more attention to what we do quarter-over-quarter nowadays."

Kevin Miller, VP of data centers at AWS, said in a LinkedIn post that "this is routine capacity management, and there haven't been any recent fundamental changes in our expansion plans."

Only 31MW of new capacity came online, making this the lowest quarter of growth since Q1 2022. London saw just 14.5MW of new supply added.

45MW of capacity was taken up in the quarter, slightly lower than the first quarter in previous years. Frankfurt and London saw the majority of demand. The latter had 21MW of take-up, constituting almost half of the total take-up in the region.

Growth in the quantity of pre-leasing, where an operator signs a lease for an unbuilt or incomplete data center, also slowed. 40MW was signed this quarter, down around half YoY. Amsterdam, which had struggled to recover from a one-year moratorium on new developments from 2019, saw the bulk of pre-lets in Q1 2025.

Development still seems to be concentrated in large metropolitan areas, but power supply constraints have driven suppliers to explore outside of traditional boundaries. Areas outside of Frankfurt, including Hanau, Mainz, and Rosbach vor der Hohe, were cited as examples.

Politically, 2025 has been unpredictable, leading to potential hesitation in the market. Prior to Trump’s April 2 ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, the US President had imposed tariffs on China; imposed, paused, and lessened tariffs on long-term American trade allies Mexico and Canada; and placed tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports.

But the report says that the sector’s long-term outlook remains optimistic. The amount of pre-leased facilities in 2024, coupled with the size of the development pipeline, indicates that demand is more than healthy.

With regards to the latter, the report estimates that there are 1.7GW worth of projects under construction, with 870MW of capacity located in Frankfurt and London. Another 1.3GW of projects are currently planned.