At first sight, building more data centres in the Netherlands may seem difficult to justify. There are compelling reasons to continue investing in them, however, argues PwC’s chief economist Barbara Baarsma. Development of digital infrastructure is essential, and data centres are a critical part of that infrastructure.
The case against datacentres
In a country where virtually every factor of production is already close to capacity, expanding energy-intensive data centre infrastructure may seem counterintuitive. The Dutch economy is already operating close to its limits. Land is scarce. The electricity grid is congested. Water quality and availability are under pressure. Environmental constraints are tightening. And labour shortages affect almost every sector.
There is a second reason for scepticism. Data centres are not the solution to the Netherlands’ persistent productivity problem. Labour productivity growth has slowed significantly over the past decade. Building and operating data centres generates relatively limited direct employment and, by itself, does little to raise productivity across the wider economy. If we evaluate data centres solely on the basis of their immediate contribution to jobs and output, they may not appear to be the highest-value use of scarce Dutch resources.
The case for datacentres
And yet there is a compelling reason to continue investing in data centres. They are not simply buildings filled with servers; they are a critical part of the infrastructure for what may become the next stage of economic development: the intelligence economy.
For centuries, economic growth has depended on a familiar set of factors of production: labour, knowledge, capital, land, natural resources and nature itself. Now, artificial intelligence is emerging as a new factor alongside them. Sometimes AI takes on a physical form, such as robots and autonomous machines. More often, however, it exists in a digital form such as large language models (LLMs), AI agents, and AI applications that increasingly resemble digital colleagues capable of carrying out entire processes rather than isolated tasks.
These artificial systems learn faster than humans, process information at a scale that exceeds human capacity, and solve complex problems in a fraction of the time previously required. The transition towards an intelligence economy means that, under human guidance, machines are increasingly transforming data into solutions, productivity, and new forms of value creation.
From data to economic value
This shift is already visible in the Dutch economy. Today, almost ten cents of every euro earned in the Netherlands is generated through data. In 2024, the value of data products accounted for 9.6 percent of GDP. As data becomes an increasingly important factor of production, the need to store it, process it, and convert it into new applications will continue to grow. That requires computing power in the form of CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and other specialised chips that form the backbone of modern AI systems. And computing power requires physical infrastructure. That means data centres are no longer merely facilities for storing information; they are the factories of the intelligence economy.
This creates opportunities that extend far beyond cost reduction and automation. AI can help address societal challenges that have proven difficult to solve in the past decades. It can accelerate the maintenance of bridges, locks, and waterfront infrastructure, support the discovery of new medicines, speed up the energy transition, strengthen climate adaptation, and improve the efficiency of mobility systems and public services.
Enabling digital entrepreneurship
New ventures will be of crucial importance in this transformation. Start-ups and scale-ups are often the creators of novel products, services, and business models. They also tend to focus less on incremental optimisation and more on discovering new forms of value creation. To thrive, they need access to advanced computational resources. Without that access, innovation risks becoming concentrated in a handful of global technology firms.
This is why investment in digital infrastructure matters. And yes, that includes data centres.
We should not allow future productivity growth to be constrained by a shortage of computing power. The chips that power artificial intelligence are becoming as economically important as electricity, transport networks, and telecommunications were in previous eras. A country that lacks access to these resources risks becoming a consumer rather than a creator of the next generation of technologies.
Shared-ownership data centres
This also raises questions around strategic autonomy, because computing capacity is rapidly becoming a strategic asset. Europe should not depend on foreign-owned digital infrastructure for technologies that increasingly underpin economic activity, public services, and national security. One promising model would be cooperative data centres in which local stakeholders, from start-ups and scale-ups to SMEs and large corporations, jointly own and share access to computing infrastructure. Such a model would strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty while broadening access to AI infrastructure.
Building more data centres should not mean ignoring environmental constraints, of course. Quite the contrary: it is in the interest of data centre operators themselves to minimise consumption of electricity and water. Beyond reducing operating costs, lower resource use also increases the likelihood of obtaining permits in a country facing grid congestion and water-related challenges. This will become an even more important factor in 2027, when the requirements of the European Water Framework Directive become more stringent.
Designing the right conditions
Properly designed incentives can ensure that data centres become part of the solution rather than part of the problem: smart regulation can help align economic and environmental objectives; higher water prices can provide incentives for efficient use; and dynamic electricity pricing can encourage data centres to shift demand to periods of lower network congestion and to use batteries to absorb or supply power when needed.
The real question for the Netherlands is not whether it wants more data centres, but what kind of data centres it wants. If the centres are strategically located, resource-efficient, European-controlled, and focused on enabling the Dutch intelligence economy, they have the potential to become one of the most important investments in the country’s future productivity and prosperity.
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