A former lignite region in northern Greece is the site of one of Europe’s largest planned data centres, part of a €5.8 billion push by the Public Power Corporation (PPC) to turn Western Macedonia into a technology and clean-energy hub.
PPC aims to build a 300 MW facility in Kozani by the end of 2028 and expand it to as much as 1 GW by 2031. The company says the project would create about 2,200 permanent jobs, including roughly 1,500 once the centre reaches full scale. Construction could employ up to 7,500 people at its peak. Bloomberg first reported the scale of the plan.
The project is meant to replace an economy built on coal. PPC still accounts for about 40% of economic activity in Western Macedonia. At its peak in 2010 it employed about 5,500 people there. Today it has about 1,250 staff in the area. The Agios Dimitrios lignite plant, 18 km from Kozani, is almost shut: 58 workers remain, down from 420 earlier this year. Remaining lignite is going to Ptolemaida 5, which is due to stop using coal by the end of the year.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has tied his government to the region’s recovery ahead of elections due next spring. Last month he said the state would mobilise European funds and that the transition would bring more and better-paid work. Residents say that promise has been slow to arrive since Athens announced an end to lignite generation in 2019.
Kozani’s centre still looks like a small Greek town: a church, the town hall, cafés. A few streets away, closed shutters tell another story. Athanasios Dragatsikas, head of the local chamber of commerce, says about 650 of 1,500 shops have shut and young people are leaving. “The worst thing you can do to people is to make them feel hopeless,” he said.
Mayor Yiannis Kokkaliaris welcomed the data centre and related energy projects but asked what replaces the lost wages. “Nobody is saying the plants should not close. But they should tell us precisely what happens the next day,” he said in July. He argued the region would accept a cleaner industry if it employed about 3,000 people on similar pay.
Data centres elsewhere have met resistance over power, water and land. In Kozani the plan is treated as a lifeline. PPC says the site would use about 0.6% of the water once needed for lignite operations and that power would come from the company’s regional network under a long-term purchase agreement, without adding load to the national grid. It is talking to hyperscale cloud providers about leasing the facility.
Demand for European data centres has surged with artificial intelligence, but growth is constrained by electricity and grid capacity. The European Data Center Association says that bottleneck is tightening. Worldwide, data-centre numbers have risen from about 500,000 in 2021 to about 8 million, with power use almost doubling between 2022 and 2026.
Union leader Yiannis Fasidis said the region welcomes investment that means jobs, on one condition: PPC staff should do the work. Retiree Theodoros Pilalidis, who spent 33 years in the mines, put the test more simply: the region needs a future. “This has not happened so far.”
PPC is working with the University of Western Macedonia on training for the new plants and the IT sector. Rector Theodoros Theodoulidis, whose father was a miner, said the area lacks any other project of this size. “What the area is missing is a major investment that will change the psychology.”
