High energy prices could derail Europe’s AI race with U.S. and China

Europe wants to position itself as a leader in AI and compete with the U.S. and China — but experts told CNBC that its soaring energy prices could undermine those ambitions.

The region is looking to get ahead in the AI arms by ramping up compute capacity and building out the critical infrastructure needed for the technology. But power-hungry data centers mean investments are particularly sensitive to the cost of energy, and Europe's prices are surging amid the U.S.-Iran war.

Data center projects are likely to migrate to parts of Europe with lower power costs, creating winners and losers across the continent, the experts said.

"The difference in the cost of energy around the world is going to become really quite extreme," Michael Brown, global investment strategist at Franklin Templeton, told CNBC.

"If you're making energy-intensive investments, then you're going to go to where the cheapest energy is. If I were making the next $7 billion data center, it would be in the U.S. or China."

"There's been a renewed interest in electrifying the economy after the recent Iran crisis," Olivier Darmouni, associate professor at HEC Paris who specializes in the energy transition, said during a Tuesday briefing with reporters.

He found that the rapid growth of data centers could inflate regional electricity costs by 20-40% in red-hot areas such as Texas and Virginia in the U.S. or Slough in the U.K. and Paris in France.

AI is a "wake-up call" to think about the energy system as a matter of economic sovereignty, he said. "Affordability and inflation, competitiveness to the European companies and technological leadership in the form of AI — we can't get any of that if we don't fix the energy system."

Prices for energy-intensive industries in Europe last year were on average roughly double in the U.S. and 50% higher than in China and India, according to the International Energy Agency.

Data centers now consume 2% of the world's electricity, up from 1.7% in 2024, according to a report from the International Data Center Authority (IDCA) published on Wednesday.

IDCA's report found that community and political pushback against the facilities typically intensifies once data centers exceed 5% of national electricity consumption — marking a key tipping point.

The U.S. is nearly at the 6% threshold, the U.K. is at 5.8%, and Singapore is at 19.5%, according to the report.

Chris Seiple, vice chairman of Wood Mackenzie's power and renewables division, told CNBC there were three reasons Europe was behind in data center development: "One is the cost of energy, two is the geographic location of the companies developing data centers, and three is the speed to market – the amount of time it takes to build the infrastructure and get connected."

These "make Europe a little bit more challenging to do data center development," he added.

Europe has a plan to boost its compute capacity and data center buildout, but the bloc faces a real challenge in deciding whether it really wants to have technological leadership in AI, Darmouni said.

"We can't do that without having lots and lots of data centers. The scale of what we're seeing in the U.S. compared to what we've seen in Europe is like 1 to 100. Europe is really, really behind. If we want to match what they're doing in the U.S., it would require even more investment."

"The middle part of Europe has already lost the game," Vladimir Prodanovic, principal programme manager at Nvidia, said during a panel at a conference in Denmark in April. He cited high electricity costs in Germany and the U.K., as an example.

In May, the average price per MW for electricity in the U.K. was $111.65, compared with $88.97 in Germany, $44.19 in France and $28 in the U.S, according to the IEA.

Like the EU, the U.K. has a plan to build out its data center capacity, but last month, OpenAI said it was pausing its Stargate project in the country partly because of the cost of energy. It also cited the country's regulatory environment as a cause of concern.

HEC Paris' Darmouni said he expected AI models to introduce pricing eventually. In that scenario, customers using Anthropic's Claude AI, for example, would have to pay more in the U.K., he added.

Many are going to be "worried about price discrimination for AI services down the road, and they're likely to be related to energy costs, because that's the marginal cost of providing AI services — electricity," Darmouni said.

The Nordics and France are often touted as the countries that are best placed to benefit from AI investments due to lower electricity prices and their diverse energy mix.

"For me at the moment, the number one is Norway, nearly every big AI company is there," Nvidia's Prodanovic said, adding that companies are also moving to Denmark and Sweden.

Microsoft is among the hyperscalers investing heavily in the Nordics. The tech giant has partnered with Nscale for a major $6.2 billion deal to build AI infrastructure in Norway; it has a $3.2 billion expansion planned in Sweden and is planning to invest $3 billion in data center capacity in Denmark between 2023 and 2027.

The Nordics have grown used to low electricity prices, according to Vili Lehdonvirta, professor of economic sociology and digital research at the Oxford Internet Institute. He noted that this has led to negative prices in Finland on some days during the winter, meaning utilities pay consumers to use electricity.

"Consumers have gotten used to this ... it means they can heat their sauna all day long. They're not only saving money, they're making money," he told CNBC Explains.

Darmouni said that France has a "huge advantage" when it comes to lower electricity prices, as it's a leader in European nuclear energy.

But he said lower electricity prices are not the only factor to consider, but also which country has the ambition to build new power sources.

"What Europe needs is more integration that goes way beyond national boundaries of transmission, light and storage, to make sure that the energy price can be uniform across places," he said.

In places like the U.K., Scandinavia, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy, their geography makes this integration difficult, Darmouni said, adding that countries like France and Germany are more integrated because they're neighbours.

An imbalance between supply and demand, leading to higher development costs will also play a role. The cost of securing data center capacity in Europe's five largest markets — Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin — is set to rise by 12% in 2026, according to research from real estate investment company CBRE.