Romania ranks in Tier 3 in the European data center rankings, mainly because it is not located along the data traffic corridor between the Middle East and Western Europe, but there is an opportunity to double the number of data centers, starting with small and medium-sized facilities, said Gabriel Tache, Segment Sales Director for Utilities & Renewables Emerging Cluster at Eaton Electric, at the DigitALL 2026 conference organized by Energynomics in Bucharest.
Tache noted that there are already government agencies and local municipalities interested in consolidating existing micro data centers into larger facilities. Additionally, Romania has a legacy energy infrastructure, including systems of hundreds of MW built before 1989, onto which new investments could be built.
Currently, two hyperscale or AI data centers are under construction in Romania, one of which is located in the center of the country. At the same time, American investors have launched projects for 400–600 MW modular data centers, equipped with backup and disaster recovery solutions, some of which are located near cogeneration power plants to ensure their energy needs are met.
Technically speaking, the energy requirement per processing unit has increased significantly. By 2026, consumption reached just under 1 MW per rack, driven primarily by the computing demands of artificial intelligence applications, which also entails large amounts of heat that must be managed.
Tache anticipates structural changes in how data centers interact with the power grid.
“Data centers will be a huge help to the grid,” he said, noting that they will be able to regulate grid frequency, deliver power during peak times, and store green energy when they aren’t using it for processing. Another expected trend is the shift from alternating current to direct current distribution and higher voltages to cope with the pressure generated by the high volume of computing.
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According to Tache, Eaton is already implementing such a concept and is working on a design for a data center of approximately 10 MW where a combination of photovoltaic systems and the “UPS as a Grid” solution is being tested, whereby UPS batteries are used to regulate the grid frequency when necessary, Tache added.
The DigitALL 2026 conference was organized by Energynomics, with the support of our partners: CBRE Romania, Eaton Electric, EnergoBit, KSTAR New Energy, WALDEVAR Energy, and WTW Romania.