Energa Obrót, CGE and Konin sign LOI for a 100MW data center in Poland

Energa Obrót, the electricity retailer, has signed a letter of intent with renewable energy developer Central Energy Group and the municipality of Konin to develop a staged data center in the Polish city that CGE estimates at just under €3 billion ($3.4bn), with construction due to begin in early 2027 at 100MW of IT compute capacity and room to reach 260MW if the municipality approves further phases.

CGE is spearheading the development and will build it with JLL, the real estate consultant; both first-phase permits are already in hand, environmental consent from January 2026 and the building permit from that May, though the project was first proposed in April. That leaves the environmental clearance predating the proposal it clears, an ordering the announcement does not explain and one worth holding onto rather than smoothing over.

According to Inzynier budownictwa, the facility’s electricity needs will be met by the Konin coal-fired power plant, battery energy storage systems and several solar plants, while CGE brings its own generation in the form of a 2MW solar plant at Rychwał and an 18MW onshore wind farm at Kraśnica, two villages in central Poland; a district heating network that would siphon waste heat from the server rooms has also been proposed.

Set against the 100MW first phase, CGE’s 20MW of own wind and solar leaves the coal plant and whatever on-site storage is added doing the heavy lifting — the practical version of the argument that grid access has become the asset and generation a derivative of permission. The 12 underground fuel tanks point to on-site backup generation, though the disclosure does not name the equipment behind them.

Three items are missing from the announcement, and they are the three that decide returns: a tenant, a price, and a capital stack. The €3 billion is an estimate of CGE’s investment, not a signed financing; no anchor tenant is named and no offtake terms are disclosed, and nothing assigns Energa Obrót a role beyond its signature, though the presence of an electricity retailer as a party to an LOI for a 260MW-capable campus suggests the company sits on the supply side of the power arrangement, though the coverage does not say so.

It is the same pattern this publication has flagged in renewable energy showing up in compute: a capacity number and a list of partners advance while the price column stays blank, and merchant risk settles on whoever ends up owning the asset. In Konin the blank is larger than usual, because a data center’s revenue begins with a tenant who has not been identified, and the first 100MW of a staged campus likely carries a disproportionate share of the fixed cost.

Poland has seen several large data center projects announced in recent months: Polcom, a cloud services operator, is developing a 40MW facility in Skawina, in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship — a project covered here in September, when the question was whether Polcom’s sovereign cloud could fill six halls before 2030, with Polcom itself as the anchor tenant — and farther north, WBS Power is spearheading a 3.2GW project in Choczewo, in Pomeranian Voivodeship.

At Konin, just under €3 billion spread across the eventual 260MW works out to roughly $13 million per megawatt of IT capacity; confined to the 100MW first phase, the same estimate is about $34 million a megawatt. Because that figure also covers offices, technical structures and fuel storage, it is not the per-megawatt build cost applied to Skawina — roughly $1 million a megawatt — and the comparison should not be pushed further than the numbers allow; what it establishes is that the estimate bundles land, permits, energy assets and shell into one number before anyone has signed for the compute.

Mayor Piotr Korytkowski welcomed the LOI as a step toward making Konin an AI hub for Poland and Europe and expects significant revenue from property taxes; the municipal arithmetic runs the other way as well, because the same body that granted the phase-one permits holds the decision on further phases, so 260MW is as much a Konin decision as a CGE plan.

The LOI schedules construction for early 2027, with 100MW before the municipality and another 160MW sitting behind its approval; the next document worth reading is the one that names a tenant, or the resolution that unlocks the phases beyond the first. Until one of them appears, the €3 billion remains an estimate attached to an intention.