Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years

Amazon Web Services' European expansion has hit the buffers as the American cloud provider grapples with aging grid infrastructure and lengthy interconnect delays.

AWS has moved quickly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, said in an interview with Reuters this week.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in some European datacenter meccas, like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, this wait can extend to as much as a decade.

This isn't unique to Europe. While a 2025 IEA report showed grid connection lead times ranging from one to three years on average across the US, in datacenter hot spots like Northern Virginia, they're also pushing [PDF] seven years ...