Polcom to spend PLN 150 million on a data centre for a sovereign AI cloud

Polcom is building out Polcom AI Cloud, a computing environment for artificial intelligence in which the infrastructure, models and training data stay under Polish jurisdiction. The company has already spent PLN 42 million modernising its existing IT and power facilities. The next step is Data Center 3 in Skawina.

The new facility will run at up to 40 MW and cost around PLN 150 million. Polcom plans to switch it on in 2030. That is a different order of investment from the American campuses whose capacity is counted in gigawatts, but it answers a different need. European companies now look beyond available capacity. They want to know where the data sits, which jurisdiction the supplier answers to, and who controls how the data is processed.

Marcin Gwóźdź, president of the Polcom management board, says AI is moving quickly from experiments to real business applications. That drives demand for environments where companies can develop and scale such projects safely.

Regulation is shaping purchasing decisions too, above all the EU artificial intelligence act and the compliance rules that the financial, industrial and public sectors have to meet. A niche is opening in Europe for suppliers that pair local infrastructure with high power density workloads, the kind AI models generate.

Energy remains the biggest question. A Capgemini Research Institute study, "AI meets the grid", found that 77 percent of energy sector leaders fear demand from data centres will grow faster than the ability to meet it. Seven in ten energy company representatives and 83 percent of data centre operators expect AI infrastructure to significantly raise regional energy demand over the next three to five years.

Volume is not the whole problem. As many as 80 percent of energy companies say the loads AI systems generate vary more than those of traditional industrial customers, which forces a different approach to planning reserves and grids. Data centre operators are therefore looking more often at their own power sources, while utilities use AI to forecast load and cut outages. The Polish project follows the same pattern: without secured energy, no sovereign cloud can carry training workloads.

The Polish investment is small next to campuses in the USA, but it fits a clear trend. Local data centres are winning customers on regulatory compliance rather than price. The EU AI act and industry data processing rules increasingly require companies to state where the model, the documentation and the training data physically sit. For a bank or an industrial plant that often matters more than a few cents of difference in the price of a GPU hour. The budget of PLN 150 million and the capacity of up to 40 MW are aimed not at global laboratories but at Polish and European companies that need a contract with a supplier under national jurisdiction.