Construction permit granted for massive data center in Amsterdam Zuidoost

The company Equinix has been granted permission to build another data center in Amsterdam Zuidoost. For now, the company will only build a quarter of the planned data center, waiting for the power grid to be upgraded to handle the center in its entirety. Construction will soon start on a single 60-meter-high tower on the Amstel III business park, where the city is planning to build thousands of homes in the coming years, Parool reports.

Due to congestion on the power grid, Amsterdam imposed a moratorium on the construction of data centers last year. This data center was approved before the ban was implemented.

This will be Equinix’s tenth data center in and around Amsterdam. The building permit was published on Monday. The data center will eventually consist of four towers, requiring a connection capacity of 80 megawatts and electricity consumption of around 779 million kilowatt-hours per year. For comparison, all the households in Amsterdam consumed 869 million kilowatt-hours in 2024.

For the data center, Equinix is building its own connection to TenneT’s high-voltage grid, which is currently over-congested. Capacity will only become available after the construction of large TenneT substations around the city, expected to be completed in 2036. In the meantime, Equinix will use Liander’s electricity grid - space it applied for years ago.

According to Equinix director Michiel Eielts, the construction of only one of the four planned towers is a compromise. It is only using half of the space Liander can offer it, and that space will become available again once Equinix can link to TenneT’s grid.

Eielts stressed to Parool that Equinix wants to make this data center part of the new neighborhood rising on the former Amstel III business park. The company is making residual heat from the data center available free of charge to heat homes and offices in the neighborhood via a heat network. The company is also making the land around the data center and the plinth on the ground floor available to the municipality to establish facilities for locals.

Eielts emphasized that data centers are essential for healthcare, businesses, and other Amsterdam customers who need server space. The company also stressed that the data storage space of this data center will be used by Amsterdam companies. There was a lot of controversy over a data center in Westpoort this year because it was leased in its entirety by American Big Tech company Microsoft, even before construction began.

Data centers place a heavy burden on scarce public infrastructure. The municipality of Amsterdam warned last year that the congested electricity grid threatens the construction of homes, dozens of schools, asylum shelters, and the OBA Next library. The municipality also concluded earlier this year that the electricity grid around Amstel III has insufficient capacity for the planned 5,500 to 8,000 homes.

Data centers also require a lot of water to cool the servers. Equinix has requested 274 million liters of cooling water per year. That will rise to 1,095 million liters per year once the entire data center is built. Drinking water is also scarce. Amsterdam and Waternet are already investing heavily in extra water purification capacity to keep up with the city's growth.

A spokesperson for Alderman Alexander Scholtes told Parool that the agreements about the data center were made a long time ago and the municipality faces massive damage claims if it pulls out.