AI is rapidly becoming part of daily life, and demand for data centres is rising too. As of 2025, the US remained the clear global leader in data centres, with more than twice the EU total. At the same time, the European Commission aims to strengthen Europe’s sovereignty and competitiveness in the AI and cloud ecosystem.
Data from global hiring platform Indeed show that data centre job postings are rising in Europe. As of August 2026, they were above pre-pandemic levels across 10 European economies, while postings for other tech roles and overall job postings were lagging behind data centre postings.
So, which countries saw the biggest rise in data centre job postings? How much more do these jobs pay than the same occupations in other sectors? And why is there a pay premium?
The recent rise is most striking in Spain, Italy and Ireland. When data centre job postings on Indeed are indexed at 100 for the average between December 2019 and February 2020, the index exceeded 200 points in all three countries as of August 2026.
This means postings more than doubled compared with pre-pandemic levels. The index stood at 260 in Spain, 237 in Italy and 210 in Ireland.
Aubrey Woessner, an economist at Indeed, and Pawel Adrjan, director of research at Indeed, said that Spain and Italy had more room to grow as both started from a low base.
“They are seeing major new AI-focused build-outs, such as campuses in Aragón and projects around Milan, rather than legacy sites clustered around major population hubs such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin,” they told Euronews Business.
The rise is also more than 30% in the Netherlands (138), Poland (134) and Switzerland (133).
Belgium recorded the lowest increase at 9%, followed by France at 13%. The rise is 25% in Germany and 24% in the UK.
As of August 2026, tech job postings excluding data centre roles were below pre-pandemic levels in nine of the 10 countries. Spain was the only exception, with the index just one point above its pre-pandemic level.
Data centre job postings significantly outpaced other tech job postings, with the widest gaps in Italy (173 points), Spain (159 points) and Ireland (141 points).
The chart below shows this trend as of August 2026.
Europe’s data centre hiring is spread across more companies
Compared with the US, where just 10 big tech companies account for 71% of data centre postings, data centre hiring in Europe is spread across many companies, according to Indeed.
“Across the ten European countries we analysed, it takes over 500 firms to account for 70% of data centre postings,” Woessner and Adrjan said.
Data centre jobs offer higher pay for the same roles
Advertised salaries for data centre roles are generally higher than for similar jobs in other sectors in the same country.
The pay premium is clear: in 28 of the 29 country-occupation pairs, data centre jobs offer higher salaries. The only exception is very small, at -1% for IT infrastructure, operations and support roles in France.
Data centre employers in Italy offer significantly higher pay than other sectors. For example, management roles in data centres pay 65% more, while installation and maintenance roles offer 50% higher advertised pay.
In the UK, management roles in data centres offer 49% higher pay. In Germany, installation and maintenance roles pay 36% more.
Why do data centre employers pay more for the same job?
Woessner and Adrjan noted that data centres may be a small slice of the overall labour market, but they are competing for the same technicians and infrastructure specialists as other industries going through the digital and green transitions in Europe.
“Postings related to data centre roles ask for more skills, on average, than other postings in the same field,” Woessner and Adrjan said.
“Concrete technical and digital skills – including knowledge of IT systems, software, and cybersecurity – as well as English language requirements are also over-represented in data centre-related roles compared with other roles in the same occupation.”
They noted that higher pay also helps attract workers quickly to keep projects on schedule.
Which jobs dominate data centre hiring?
Woessner and Adrjan explained that the mix of occupations in data centre hiring across Europe points to two trends happening at the same time: continued staffing of existing data storage and cloud facilities, and an emerging boom in new AI-related construction.
Five occupations account for between 50% and 60% of data centre job postings in Europe: IT infrastructure, operations and support; software development; management; installation and maintenance; and project management.
While demand for workers in data centre-related jobs is rising, these roles still make up only a small share of total job postings in each country. In most of the countries analysed, the share is around 1% or less.
Ireland is the exception, where nearly 5% of all job postings on Indeed now mention a data centre.
Is there a skills shortage in data centres?
Indeed economists expect the growth phase to continue for some time, as the EU aims to triple its data centre capacity within five to seven years.
“One concern for employers is that data centres are competing for workers with technical skills that were already in short supply even before the data centre boom,” Woessner and Adrjan said.
As of 2025, Germany (529) and the UK (523) had the highest numbers of data centres in Europe, followed by France (322) and the Netherlands (298). Italy had 168, Spain and Poland each had 144, and Switzerland had 121.
Western Europe dominates the region’s data centre infrastructure, while Northern Europe has a smaller but strategically important presence. Central and Eastern Europe’s infrastructure is more fragmented and less developed.
