The FLAP-D Core and Its Overflow
For twenty years, European data-center demand concentrated in five cities: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin. That concentration was not an accident of taste. It followed peering fabric, subsea landings, and the banks and clouds that anchored latency-sensitive workloads. But the core is now constrained. Amsterdam and Dublin have imposed moratoria; Frankfurt zoning has tightened. The scarce asset was never the building. It was entitled, powered land inside a metro the grid could still feed. When that runs out, demand does not vanish. It spills to the edge of the core and to the next ring of markets. Read the spillover, and you read the decade.
Knowledge check
Why did European data-center demand historically concentrate in the five FLAP-D metros rather than spreading evenly across the continent?
Show the answer
Because those metros held the dense peering fabric, subsea cable landings, and anchor tenants (banks, clouds) that latency-sensitive workloads require; interconnection gravity, not real estate, drove the concentration, and only later did power and land availability become the binding constraint.