Poland Bets on AI – But Doesn’t Talk About the Costs
Poland already hosts one-third of all data centre capacity in Central and Eastern Europe. But as investment pours into artificial intelligence, a debate about the environmental impact is missing.
The boom in data centres in Poland looks like almost nothing from the outside. Scattered across the outskirts of big cities, behind perimeter fencing and with little signage, the windowless warehouses rarely attract attention.
Inside, however, are servers processing everything from online banking and cloud computing to the large language models that millions now use every day.
The buildings are multiplying fast. On the Baltic coast, a campus planned near the village of Lublewo is expected to reach 3.2 GW of capacity – large enough to rank among the biggest data-centre projects in the world.
Poland now accounts for more than one-third of Central and Eastern Europe's data-centre capacity, and that figure is expected to triple by the end of the decade.
To government officials and the tech industry, the boom represents a rare opportunity.
“Poland has become Europe’s largest energy construction site, with around one trillion zlotys (€235 billion) worth of projects under way,” Krystian Pyplacz, an expert at the Polish Data Centre Association, PLDCA, told BIRN.
But as the country races to become a digital powerhouse, basic questions about the environmental footprint of its AI infrastructure remain unanswered.
Warsaw’s appeal is straightforward. Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, known in the industry by the shorthand FLAP-D are, in Pyplacz’s words, “struggling with serious constraints” – lack of suitable land, strict environmental requirements, and overloaded power grids.
Poland offers something that’s increasingly scarce: available land, lower labour costs, one of Europe’s largest ICT workforces and a relatively cold climate that reduces cooling costs.
Pyplacz says a narrow five-to-seven-year investment window has opened as the European Union seeks to triple its computing capacity to meet growing demand for AI and cloud services. “We should seize this opportunity, so that at least some of these enormous investments land in Poland,” he says.
Artificial intelligence, AI, is changing not only demand but the infrastructure itself. Unlike conventional cloud facilities, which typically require 8–12 kilowatts of power per server rack, AI workloads demand between 40 and 125 kW, with some of the newest systems exceeding 240 kW. That shift is forcing operators to adopt new technologies, such as direct liquid cooling, and to build campuses measured in hundreds of megawatts.
“AI’s expansion isn’t simply another stage of digitisation,” Pyplacz explained. “It is fundamentally reshaping the market.”
The Polish government shares that ambition. Its Digitalisation Strategy 2035 envisages spending around 5 per cent of GDP on digitalisation – the equivalent of Poland’s current defence budget – as well as introducing AI across 80 percent of public administration and creating 16,000 AI classrooms in schools. Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski recently called AI “the most breakthrough technology in human history”.
A 2026 survey found that nearly half of working Poles now use generative AI regularly at work, up from 27.3 per cent a year earlier, while almost 86 per cent have tried it at least once. As AI becomes embedded in everyday life, 16 per cent of respondents say they use it for emotional support, and 8.1 per cent even call it a friend or romantic partner.
CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, September 2025. Photo illustration: EPA/JIM LO SCALZO.
“AI may seem intangible, but the infrastructure around it is anything but,” Anna Meres of Greenpeace told BIRN. “Behind every AI application are server halls, cooling systems, electricity grids, water consumption and chip manufacturing. AI depends on physical resources that we all share.”
Globally, data centres consumed 448 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, according to the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Had these centres been a country, they would have ranked 11th worldwide for electricity consumption.
“Energy is the key raw material for the data-centre sector,” Pyplacz said.
Poland’s own projections also suggest that the issue will soon become impossible to ignore. According to the state transmission system operator PSE, electricity demand from data centres is expected to rise from just 0.6 TWh in 2024 to 29.4 TWh by 2040, equal to more than one in every ten units of electricity consumed in Poland that year.
“The key question is what will meet that demand,” Meres said. “Will data centres accelerate investment in renewable energy, storage and grids – or become another argument for burning fossil fuels?”
