Alexandra Garatzogianni is Digital Ambassador of EUSEW 2026, and a researcher at the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) and Leibniz University Hannover. This article is published in partnership with EUSEW 2026.
Europe’s energy transition is increasingly shaped by its digital infrastructure. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data-intensive services are driving higher electricity consumption. At the same time, electricity systems depend on digital tools to integrate renewables, forecast demand, and manage variability. These two trends are not separate — they are converging, and that convergence raises questions that European governance has yet to answer adequately.
The growth of data centres is the most visible example. Decisions on where to build them, at what scale, and on what timeline, have direct consequences for electricity demand and grid capacity. Those decisions are often made without systematic coordination with energy planning bodies. The result can be path dependencies — infrastructure choices today that constrain policy options tomorrow.
Meanwhile, EU energy and digital policies continue to be developed along largely separate institutional tracks. Both sectors acknowledge the need for better coordination, but the frameworks in place have limited capacity to capture cross-sector feedback effects. Energy planning increasingly incorporates assumptions about digital demand growth; digital investment decisions depend on electricity availability and grid connection timelines. These mutual dependencies are real, but the governance structures that should manage them remain fragmented.
There are also implications for strategic autonomy. Europe’s capacity to act independently in the energy sector is no longer just a function of domestic energy supply. It depends on access to critical raw materials for digital hardware, the resilience of supply chains, and the availability of specialised skills. Strengthening one dimension of this system can create vulnerabilities in another.
None of this calls for a single regulatory solution. What it does call for is greater alignment between energy and digital strategies, earlier coordination in infrastructure planning, and governance models that reflect the way these systems actually interact. That means involving grid operators and digital infrastructure developers in the same planning processes, and building regulatory capacity to assess cross-sector effects.
Europe’s long-term competitiveness will depend not only on what infrastructure gets built, but on whether the governance frameworks guiding that infrastructure keep pace with the systems they are meant to govern.
