"The cloud" is really thousands of warehouses full of humming servers, drinking electricity around the clock. Across Europe there are more than 4,000, and a handful of countries carry most of them. Scroll to explore.
Every search, stream and chatbot reply runs through a physical building. Europe's 4,040 data centres, mapped to a 100 km grid. Hover any cell for the count and the country that hosts it.
The load is far from even. It concentrates in a red belt, the Netherlands, western Germany, Frankfurt, plus the UK, France and Ireland. These are the chokeholds, where fibre, money and power converge.
Ranked by number of sites, Germany (319) and the UK (290) top the list, then France and the Netherlands. Ireland sits mid-table on count, but that's not the whole story.
Measured as a share of national electricity, one country dwarfs the rest. Ireland's data centres take 22% of everything it uses, several times any big economy, and more than all its urban homes combined.
Together, Europe's data centres draw about 100 TWh a year. Mark whole nations along that same bar and the scale lands: Kenya's entire grid barely reaches a tenth of it; Nigeria, 220 million people, a third; even Bangladesh, with 170 million, doesn't fill it.
Take Ireland as the example. The biggest names ring the city, Microsoft and Google at Grange Castle, Amazon at Clonshaugh, Meta at Clonee, feeding off the same grid.
Start north-west of Dublin at Meta's Clonee campus. Those two vast blocks, ringed by substations and generators, are the data centre. A single hyperscale site like this can draw well over 100 MW.
West of the city, Microsoft's Grange Castle halls stretch across the business park, windowless blocks the size of aircraft hangars, ringed by chillers and substations.
North of the city at Clonshaugh, Amazon's AWS campus sits between the M1 and M50, rows of identical sheds, each drawing a steady, enormous load.
Back at Grange Castle South, Google, Amazon (DUB6), CyrusOne, Vantage and Digital Realty sit wall to wall, with more under construction. One business park, a meaningful slice of a national grid.
Ireland CSO 2024 · EU Commission / IEA figures · imagery © Google · figures approximate
Data & method. Data-centre counts aggregated from public registries (~4,040 sites). National grid shares are approximate: Ireland's 22% is from the Central Statistics Office (2024); other countries are indicative estimates. Europe-wide electricity ≈100 TWh/yr (~4% of EU demand) per the European Commission and IEA; national totals for Kenya, Nigeria and Bangladesh are approximate recent figures. Campus locations are from public mapping; power figures are estimates. Satellite imagery © Esri; line map © CARTO/OpenStreetMap; via Leaflet.
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