Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
Data Centres: Boom and Backlash
7JUL

Where the next data centres should go

5 min read
09:27UTC

Lowdown's structural ranking puts Kajaani and Tampere in Finland first, West Texas second, Aragón third, Abu Dhabi fourth, and Mesa Arizona fifth; the UK falls off the global top-10.

← Back to US data-centre backlash becomes lawJump to analysis ↓
IndustryAssessed
Key takeaway

The siting map is now driven by binding physical constraints, not by hyperscaler announcement maps.

Lowdown's primary analysis ranks the global top-five greenfield data-centre locations as of 6 May 2026: Kajaani and Tampere, Finland; West Texas (Midland-Abilene); Aragón, Spain; Abu Dhabi (Stargate UAE / Al Dhafra); and Mesa, Arizona. The full top-ten and the underlying scoring matrix are in the research findings; this event covers the binding constraints behind each leader and the structural reason the UK has fallen off the list.

OpenAI's Cobalt Park statement drives the UK exit , and the 50 GW UK grid queue against 45 GW national peak seals it. With both the cost ceiling and the queue ceiling now public, the UK falls below every other shortlist candidate on landed-cost economics for a 100 MW campus.

Kajaani and Tampere lead on every binding constraint. Fingrid, Finland's national grid operator, offers fast connection without a queue comparable to NESO or ERCOT; the WRI Aqueduct framework rates Finnish baseline water stress under 0.10; arctic climate gives 8,000-plus free-cooling hours a year, lifting PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness, the ratio of total facility energy to IT-equipment energy) into the 1.05-1.15 band against 1.35-1.50 for desert builds. The binding constraint is rural transmission and a small operations-talent pool, not consent or supply.

West Texas ranks second on a single structural fact: ERCOT is not synchronised with the rest of the US grid, sitting outside the federal interconnection rules FERC will issue in June. The 9.1 GW of crypto-mining brownfield infrastructure across the Midland-Abilene corridor is the practical conversion path, and the cheap curtailed-wind contracts make the operating economics work. The constraint is the same supply-side bottleneck that constrains the rest of the US fleet: turbine factory throughput stretching delivery for new orders to 2031.

Aragón ranks third on Red Eléctrica de España's approval of more than 300 MW of data-centre connections, Blackstone's eight-campus first phase reaching construction-ready status for Q2 2026, and the autonomous community generating 115 per cent of its electricity demand from wind and solar. The unresolved item is Ecologistas en Acción's challenge at the TSJ Aragón to Amazon's 30-building expansion , which produced no ruling within the briefing window. A binding decision either way reshapes European community-rights doctrine for the rest of the decade.

Abu Dhabi ranks fourth on sovereign-demand pull alone. G42 has confirmed all long-lead equipment for the 200 MW Stargate UAE first phase is procured, with commissioning targeted for Q3 2026. Forty-to-fifty-degree summer ambient temperature in Abu Dhabi forces mechanical cooling year-round, with PUE in the 1.35-1.50 band, and water comes entirely via desalination, raising the operational-energy tax against any Nordic comparator.

Mesa rounds out the top five. APS (Arizona Public Service) and SRP (Salt River Project) offer 18-24 month large-load connection windows against 36-48 in Northern Virginia, with solar PPAs (power purchase agreements) at $20-25/MWh. The medium-term constraint is real: Phoenix sits at WRI 'high' to 'extremely high' baseline water stress, and Colorado River allocation cuts are under active state review.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Finding the best place to build a new large data centre in 2026 has become genuinely difficult. This analysis ranked the top sites globally. Finland came first: it has fast grid connections, very cheap electricity from hydro and wind power, very low water stress (it has plenty of water), and a planning system that has worked with big industrial buildings before. West Texas came second because it has a huge stock of old Bitcoin mining facilities that can be converted without needing to apply for a new grid connection. Spain's Aragón region came third because it produces 15 per cent more electricity from renewables than it uses. Abu Dhabi came fourth because the UAE government is paying for a big data centre programme itself, which removes the financial risk. Arizona's Mesa area came fifth because its grid authority can connect new facilities in 18-24 months. The UK did not make the top 10: electricity costs four times more than in the US or Scandinavia, and there is a five-year wait for a grid connection.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

The convergence of grid headroom, renewable surplus, water stress, and consent maturity as the four selection criteria reflects a structural shift in what makes data centre development viable in 2026.

Grid headroom became a binding criterion because the 2020-2025 build wave consumed the available connection capacity at every major first-tier market simultaneously: Northern Virginia, Dublin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Singapore all reached interconnection-queue gridlock within a 24-month window.

Renewable surplus matters because hyperscaler scope-2 emissions targets (100 per cent renewable electricity by 2025, a target only Google and Microsoft have formally committed to and neither has fully achieved) require locations where renewable generation exceeds grid demand, enabling operators to claim hourly renewable energy certificates rather than annual averages. Finland and Aragón both run at or above 100 per cent renewable generation in their respective interconnected zones.

Water stress entered the criteria set after Microsoft's 2023 disclosure that its data centres consumed 1.7 billion gallons of freshwater in 2022, and after the Johor protest (event 9 of this briefing) demonstrated that water-rights conflicts now trigger regulatory halts rather than just community opposition.

Consent maturity, the measure of how developed a jurisdiction's planning framework is for data centres specifically, is the newest criterion, and the one that produced the UK's exit from the top 10. The UK has a sophisticated planning system but no dedicated data centre planning pathway; applicants use general industrial planning rules in a 50 GW grid queue, which is functionally equivalent to having no mature consent pathway.

What could happen next?
  • Opportunity

    Finland, Aragón, and Abu Dhabi will each see accelerated hyperscaler inquiry volumes from 2026 Q2, with Fingrid and REE connection approvals becoming the near-term bottleneck rather than policy or consent.

    Short term · 0.82
  • Consequence

    The UK government's January 2026 AI infrastructure plan, written before the OpenAI statement and the NESO queue figures were publicly quantified together, will require revision to be credible as an inward-investment document; the current version does not address the consent-timeline gap.

    Short term · 0.77
  • Risk

    Aragón's top-3 ranking accelerates the Ecologistas en Acción TSJ judicial challenge from a local environmental dispute to a market-moving event: an adverse ruling could remove Spain's best-positioned site from the shortlist at a moment of peak demand.

    Medium term · 0.7
Sources:Fortum·G42 / PR Newswire·The Next Web
Mentions:Blackstone →Ecologistas en Acción →High Court of Justice of Madrid →Abu Dhabi →Al Dhafra Air Base →G42 →West Texas →Kajaani →Tampere →Fingrid →Aragón →Red Eléctrica de España →Mesa →Phoenix →WRI Aqueduct →NESO →ERCOT →Spain →Stargate →OpenAI →Virginia →Texas →Gulf Research Centre →Amazon →Northern Virginia →FERC →PUE →APS →SRP →Finland →
First Reported In

Update #2 · Maine veto, Seattle freeze, $725bn capex

Fortum· 6 May 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
Caused by
Spain's first DC lawsuit lands at TSJ Aragón
The unresolved Ecologistas en Acción TSJ Aragón challenge (ID:2791) to Amazon's expansion is the binding constraint that prevents Aragón from ranking higher than third in the May 2026 location analysis.
Occurred 1 Jan 2026
Read story →
UK queue: 50 GW DC vs 45 GW peak demand
The UK's 50 GW grid queue (ID:2786) is cited alongside the OpenAI 4x energy-cost figure as the co-equal reason the UK falls off the top-10 in the May 2026 location analysis.
Occurred 27 Feb 2026
Read story →
This Event
Where the next data centres should go
The siting map is a function of binding constraints rather than headline announcements; the UK exit and the Finnish lead are both produced by the same physical inputs.
Different Perspectives
Global hyperscale operators
Global hyperscale operators
Operators are still filing gigawatt-scale campuses and Meta is proceeding with its $10bn Lebanon, Indiana site despite the county-level bans nearby, betting Q2 capex outruns the patchwork of restrictions. Industry framing casts New York's freeze, Oregon's surcharge and Indiana's bans as taxes and levies that push build-out toward faster-permitting jurisdictions such as India and the Gulf.
EirGrid
EirGrid
EirGrid set a 900 MW instantaneous demand-loss ceiling because a single voltage dip can trip many data centres onto backup power at once, risking imbalance above 1,150 MW. It wrote the limit into a standing procedure rather than waiting for an emergency to force one.
US host communities and ratepayers
US host communities and ratepayers
Prince William residents backed the 8-0 denial of Dulles South over the Occoquan watershed, drinking water for eight million people, while Oregon's approved tariff cuts residential bills 1.3% by charging large loads 29% more. Their position: consent and cost-attribution belong in law, not left to a developer's or a utility's discretion.
Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure
Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure
Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure, an Egyptian conglomerate rather than a foreign hyperscaler, reportedly secured a domestic hyperscale licence with a $400m first phase, per single-source reporting still to be verified. It reads as home-grown sovereign compute ambition, building national capacity rather than importing a US or Gulf operator's campus.
Damac Digital
Damac Digital
Damac Digital keeps building toward roughly 6,000 megawatts of hyperscale capacity across 13 countries while Virginia taxes power and New York weighs a freeze. Every dollar or month of delay a US state adds is capacity a Gulf developer can site somewhere with faster permitting and no equivalent levy.
Acequia communities, Santa Fe County
Acequia communities, Santa Fe County
Santa Fe County commissioners voted unanimously on 2 July to freeze any data centre over one megawatt, citing the acequia irrigation commons that has shared scarce water since Spanish colonial rule. They expect the low threshold to draw the same Fifth Amendment challenge RCM Hill brought against Hill County, Texas.