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Anchoring the Cloud: local ecosystem readiness for Data Centres in Greece

Principal Investigator: Professor Konstantinos E. Zachariadis

Co-Investigator: Professor Vassilis Monastiriotis

Research Assistant: Gabriel Pierzynski

Greece is in the midst of a remarkable transformation in its digital infrastructure landscape. Hyperscale data centre providers — including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — have announced multi-billion euro investments in the country, signalling Greece's emergence as a significant node in European digital infrastructure. Yet while the national conversation has focused on digital sovereignty and geopolitical positioning, a critical question has received far less attention: are Greek regional economies actually ready to absorb these investments and translate them into lasting local economic development?

This project treats data centres not as isolated infrastructure assets but as potential catalysts for a broader local ecosystem — one capable of generating skilled employment, stimulating firm-level adoption of AI and cloud technologies, and anchoring Greece more firmly in the digital economy. The central questions are deceptively simple. Which firms and sectors stand to benefit most from proximity to local data infrastructure, and through which channels — reduced latency, energy grid synergies, data sovereignty requirements, or access to specialised technical talent? Do Greek regions currently possess the absorptive capacity to turn impending investment into genuine digital transformation? And crucially, how does that capacity vary across the country's regions, and where are the gaps largest?

Underlying these questions is a theoretical insight drawn from the economics of agglomeration and the emerging literature on AI as an economic technology. Modern data centres are not merely storage facilities — they are the physical substrate of what some economists call the "means of prediction": the compute, data residency, and energy infrastructure that enables firms to build and deploy AI systems. Whether local economies can complete this picture by supplying the right tiers of human expertise — from strategic AI adopters to operational engineers to specialised industrial technicians — is what ultimately determines whether a data centre generates a self-reinforcing ecosystem or remains an enclave disconnected from its surroundings.

That last question reflects what makes the Greek case unusually interesting from a research perspective. The country sits at a rare moment: large-scale investment has been announced but not yet deployed, offering a clean window in which to observe how firms, labour markets, and financial markets respond to the mere anticipation of new infrastructure. Whether those anticipatory signals are already visible — in regional hiring patterns, in the valuations of exposed firms on the domestic stock market, in the spatial distribution of technical talent — is itself a test of whether the catalyst mechanism is real or merely aspirational.

The answers matter well beyond Greece. As European governments compete to attract hyperscale investment and design complementary policies around it, understanding what determines whether digital infrastructure generates genuine local spillovers — and what can go wrong when the surrounding ecosystem is not ready to receive them — is a question of significant policy relevance across the continent.

Research Team