"The chance that a country like the Netherlands will actually get a serious AI factory is small. That's according to Vladimir Prodanovic, principal program manager at Nvidia. The problem, he says, is that existing data centers in the Netherlands as well as many other European countries are built on air cooling and cannot be converted to the liquid cooling required for AI infrastructure."
"The Dutch cabinet recently pledged €70 million for the construction of an AI factory in the northern province of Groningen. Together with €60 million from the Northern Netherlands and €70 million from Europe, this should result in a total investment of €200 million. The expertise center is scheduled to open in mid-2026, with the supercomputer fully operational in early 2027. But Prodanovic believes the factory will not be built."
"The Nvidia manager, who previously worked at Microsoft for many years, is adamant in his analysis during a Vertiv event in Italy. According to him, the major players based in the Netherlands are not interested in building an AI factory because their existing data centers are not suitable for this purpose. Instead, Dutch hyperscalers are looking to Spain, Italy, and Norway to purchase AI capacity from other parties."
Existing Dutch data centers are built for air cooling and lack the infrastructure for liquid cooling required by GPU-heavy AI deployments. A planned AI factory in Groningen received combined pledges totaling €200 million, with an expertise center slated for mid-2026 and a supercomputer operational in early 2027. Older data center buildings often cannot bear the static weight of manifolds and additional cabling for GPU clusters, and retrofitting for liquid cooling is technically unfeasible in many cases. As a result, major Dutch hyperscalers are seeking AI capacity from providers in Spain, Italy, and Norway, casting doubt on the factory's viability.
Read at Techzine Global
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