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HawkPodcast 34 – 3Q 2020 Europe Trends

By Rhett Gill · 10/21/2020


This is an episode of HawkPodcast, datacenterHawk’s viewpoints on the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe here.


We’ve been tracking the major European data center markets for several quarter it’s been interesting to look back and see the changes that have occured during 2020,. In this podcast, we dive into some of the third quarter specifics of the European markets and also look forward to 4Q and into 2021.

If you’re short on time, check out a few of our quick takeaways below.

Development activity during COVID-19

We saw growth and demand across all the European data center markets in the third quarter. Generally, there was a significant amount of development and leasing activity in these markets even during this COVID-19 environment.

The European markets are continuing to be a strong area of growth and look to be in place for more interest moving forward.

The Frankfurt data center market continues to grow

Frankfurt continues to be an attractive location for data center providers and users moving forward into the rest of 2020 and beyond. One data point that shows this is that it has a lower population with a high density of data centers. Looking at the overall power usage in the city, some estimates show that 35-40% of the power in Frankfurt goes directly to powering data centers. This is a massive jump compared to other major data centers markets with larger populations such as London.

What the future looks like for the European markets

Predicting the future is always tricky, especially when it comes to the European data center markets.

Growth in the data center industry happens when deals get done. This can make figuring out how much growth to expect in a quarter difficult to determine with precision. A good way to get an accurate feel of a market is by finding out if there are a number of deals pending and waiting to get done.

In the European markets specifically, there are a lot of pending deals which we expect to lead to good growth in the future.

Wrapping up, the European markets continued their growth in the third quarter with the Frankfurt market specifically standing out as an area of consistent activity. The European data center markets as a whole should have a strong fourth quarter as well as continued growth in 2021.


Don’t forget to check out the rest of our HawkPodcasts and don’t miss out on our latest release of market data for the data center industry.

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