PwC Report: Data Center Investment in Poland Could Reach $200 Billion by 2050

Poland has a chance to capture a significant slice of the global investment boom in artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to a new PwC report, cumulative data center spending in Poland could reach $200.8 billion by 2050, placing the country 11th among the 17 European markets analyzed.

The data comes from PwC's Global Data Centre Outlook report, published on September 9, 2026. The consulting firm analyzed the global infrastructure market through the lens of artificial intelligence and identified which countries stand to benefit most from the ongoing wave of investment in data centers, chips, and computing power.

Scale of the Global Boom

According to PwC, annual data center spending will grow from about $800 billion in 2026 to $1.8 trillion in 2050. Over the same period, the share of ICT hardware alone in these outlays is expected to rise from 70 to 93 percent, reflecting the growing cost of processors and AI accelerators relative to buildings and power installations.

The United States is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of this wave, with PwC forecasting it will attract 48 percent of global investment, or $15.1 trillion. The Asia-Pacific region is projected to receive another $8.2 trillion. Europe, including Poland, lags behind both blocs, but still holds a noticeable share of the global pie.

Poland's Place in the European Ranking

In the baseline scenario, Poland ranks 11th among the 17 European countries assessed, with a result close to Finland and Denmark, and higher than the Czech Republic, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, or Belgium. That signals the country is still not among Europe's top data center locations, but it isn't on the margins either.

More interesting is the second scenario PwC analyzed, called the digital sovereignty scenario. It assumes that governments and companies will increasingly prefer to keep data and computing power closer to home rather than rely on infrastructure located abroad. Under that variant, Poland's cumulative investment outlays rise 34 percent compared with the baseline scenario, putting it 8th in the global ranking of countries gaining the most from this trend.

Poland has a large economy, EU and NATO membership, and a rapidly growing digital sector - it's one of the few European markets that stands to gain from this redistribution - Kinga Barchoń, partner at PwC Poland, real estate sector leader

Strengths and Bottlenecks

The report's authors identify five factors that determine where the next wave of data center investment will land: access to energy, connectivity quality, regulatory security and predictability, local community acceptance, and access to GPUs. Of these five, energy is said to be the most significant constraint on new projects today, both in Poland and globally.

PwC lists Poland's strategic geographic location, a large pool of highly skilled engineering and IT specialists, and the dynamic growth of the renewable energy sector as the country's strengths. That aligns with what foreign investors scouting locations in Central Europe have been signaling for months.

At the same time, the sheer scale of the numbers shows that realizing this potential will still take considerable effort. The $200.8 billion figure, spread over more than two decades, works out to an average of a few billion dollars a year, and that depends on whether the power grid and regulations can keep pace with the timeline investors building data centers for AI workloads expect.

What It Means for Polish Companies

For Poland's IT and construction sectors, PwC's forecast confirms that the wave of investment in domestic digital infrastructure isn't a passing trend but a multi-year process with a concrete timeline. Companies involved in construction, cooling, backup power, or data center integration can expect a growing pipeline of contracts, provided Poland keeps up the pace of power grid expansion.

The report also feeds into a broader debate over whether Poland should focus on attracting global cloud operators or on building its own sovereign computing infrastructure. PwC's digital sovereignty scenario suggests that the second approach could, in the long run, bring the country relatively greater investment benefits than passively waiting for capital from foreign hyperscalers.