Big data poised to get bigger

The “Data Center: Real Estate, Technologies, Investments” conference, organised by Eurobuild Conferences, and held in late October at the Presidential Hotel in Warsaw, opened with an insightful presentation by Gareth Jones, the EMEA head of data centre capital markets at JLL. He highlighted the rapidly expanding global data centre sector and the opportunities emerging in Poland. Drawing on his extensive real estate experience – including working in Poland in his earlier years – he emphasised that the global boom in data infrastructure is now opening up significant prospects across Central and Eastern Europe. He explained that the data centre surge, initially driven by the pandemic-related acceleration of cloud adoption, has been further fuelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Massive investment inflows from hyperscalers and sovereign wealth funds are reshaping markets worldwide, with the EU allocating EUR 200 bln to digital infrastructure – and one