Equinix approved for mega data centre in Amsterdam‑Zuidoost, power demand rivals city’s household use

Equinix has been granted permission to construct a mega data centre in Amsterdam‑Zuidoost, within the Amstel III business park where the municipality plans to build between 5,500 and 8,000 new homes. The first phase will consist of a single 60‑metre tower, representing only a quarter of the originally planned four‑tower complex.

The facility is expected to consume about 779 MWh of electricity per year, roughly comparable to the total annual household electricity consumption in Amsterdam (around 869 MWh). City officials have said the data centre will only be connected to the grid when sufficient capacity is available, and they have warned that limited electricity and water supplies could jeopardise housing, school and other public‑infrastructure projects. Equinix plans to reuse excess heat from the servers for district heating and has applied for 274 million litres of water annually; a fully built version would need about 1.095 billion litres.

The project highlights the growing pressure that large‑scale data‑centre operations place on local energy and water infrastructure as demand for cloud services and AI accelerates.