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Connecting Europe’s Digital Ecosystem: An Interview with Andrew van der Haar
A conversation with Andrew van der Haar, founder and Managing Director of the Fiber Carrier Association, board member of the European Local Fibre Alliance (ELFA), and Senior Advisor at the Dutch Data Center Association, where he advises on educational programs and sustainable development.
– You recently took part in the 5th Constructing Next-Gen Data Centers Europe conference in Berlin, and your view is that Europe’s real challenge is one of coordination, not data center capacity. Who should be the architect of that coordination – industry, governments, or perhaps an entirely new kind of institution? How can data centers, fiber networks, energy infrastructure, policymakers and local communities be connected?
– I’d like to frame this around the position of the European Local Fibre Alliance, ELFA, which I think is highly relevant to the Polish market as well – looking at the whole digital ecosystem.
The data center challenge is part of a wider structural problem. Without good internet access at home, it’s difficult to deliver new services such as 4K or 8K television streaming, which require a fiber connection or at least a high-capacity network. You also need a data center to stream from. That’s why I describe this as a coordination problem rather than a data center problem. The recent summit in Berlin was framed around data center construction, but the real question being asked was „Where do we go from here?” The people who build data centers know how to build them – their bigger challenge now is access to power, which is a constraint in many European countries. That takes the conversation to a different level. It’s no longer enough for the data center sector to focus solely on building more capacity. It also needs to engage with the energy sector’s challenges, so that energy companies can plan around a reliable, large-scale customer like a data center.
At the moment, energy companies focus on developing the grid, data centers focus on building data centers, and other industries – chemicals, for example – focus on their own priorities, each operating in its own silo rather than working together. Who should lead that coordination is always the harder question, but The Dutch Subsea Cable Coalition is a useful model: a jointly funded public-private initiative where industry and government meet in the middle. The government doesn’t just provide funding – it’s also involved in adapting regulation to make it easier to deploy new subsea cable networks.
The same model could work at the data center level. The public and private sectors would need to collaborate, alongside grid operators (TSOs and DSOs) the data center industry, and local, national and even European government, to shape regulation that doesn’t create a burden on one side while offering a solution on the other. If a grid operator can’t expand its network, that constraint inevitably affects data centers, and vice versa. Regulatory friction in one sector tends to ripple into the other.
– Could you tell more about The Dutch Subsea Cable Coalition? The Netherlands is positioning itself as Europe’s digital gateway through subsea cable infrastructure. Poland, with its growing data center capacity and location on Europe’s eastern flank – particularly regarding connectivity toward Ukraine and further east – could play a similar role. What lessons could the Polish telecom sector draw from the Dutch model?
– The Coalition exists because the Netherlands is, by origin, a digital hub. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange has been a major meeting point for international cable traffic. Since around 2000, a wave of new subsea systems was built, connecting the Netherlands to countries across Europe and the United States. Many of those systems are now reaching the end of their 20–25 year lifespan and need replacing, but the private sector – telecom consortia – wasn’t building fast enough to keep pace. That gap was filled by major tech companies such as Google, Meta and Amazon, which began building their own dedicated cable systems when the sector couldn’t deliver at the required speed.
That created a new kind of vulnerability: a country left with international cable capacity built for a single big-tech customer has far fewer options for future connectivity. That risk is what brought the subsea and terrestrial cable industries together to approach the Dutch government and say, in effect: we need a plan, and we can’t deliver it without your help.
The lesson for Poland may not lie in subsea cables specifically, but in the model itself – building an ecosystem where data centers, connectivity providers, the Polish government and trade associations such as KIKE, PIKE and iNET, along with the Polish data center association, sit at the same table. The goal would be a shared national strategy that makes Poland attractive to investors: clear connectivity plans, a coherent data center strategy, and legislation that creates a genuine one-stop shop for anyone looking to deploy a data center or a new fiber network. Associations in Poland already do excellent work bringing the fiber, telecom and media industries together and engaging constructively with government. What I haven’t yet seen is that cooperation translate into a single national plan – and that, I believe, is where Poland could take a page from the Dutch experience.
– The Romanian example shows that some of Europe’s best fiber infrastructure was built by small, independent operators long before „technological sovereignty” became a Brussels buzzword. Does the European Technological Sovereignty Package genuinely recognize this, or is there a risk that funding and attention will once again flow toward the largest players, leaving local and regional operators behind?
– The honest answer is: both. Larger players will inevitably benefit more from a package like this, simply because they have greater capacity to prepare grant applications and more experience navigating EU funding processes. The Sovereignty Package is designed to help European companies scale and compete globally, and the European Commission also tends to prefer disbursing larger sums in fewer transactions, since that’s easier to administer and audit than the same total spread across many smaller grants. A small operator faces the same due diligence burden as a large one, just for a fraction of the funding.
This is precisely why coalition-building matters. If smaller, regional players organize collectively, they can present themselves as a larger body capable of competing for the same funds. The real risk is that operators who don’t know how to navigate EU and national funding channels (or simply lack the resources to apply) get left behind while larger players move ahead. That’s exactly why ELFA’s role matters: to give local and regional operators a collective European voice, while still preserving the national and regional character that are still present and relevant for the Polish market. It’s encouraging that the Commission has acknowledged this gap. The risk to watch is that the Commission, which has a strong track record of producing regulation, treats this package primarily as another regulatory instrument rather than as a genuine investment incentive. European technological sovereignty should be built on the whole ecosystem, not just on the players who are already best positioned to move first.
– A recent joint declaration by France and Italy argued that telecom markets are „inherently local” and that a pan-European operator wouldn’t generate meaningful synergies — in short, that Europe doesn’t need a genuine single telecom market. Critics counter that 27 separate regulatory regimes and fragmented spectrum policy leave the sector under-invested, and that without a single market, digital sovereignty is little more than a slogan. Is the France-Italy position honest realism about the complexity of ground-level infrastructure deployment, or protectionism framed as pragmatism? And what would need to change politically for a genuine single telecom market to become possible?
– My answer to this connects directly to the previous question. France and Italy are right to value the strength of local markets — but a single European telecom market doesn’t mean replacing that with one dominant continental operator. It means a single ecosystem that still has room for both local and national players.
Networks are built in municipalities and regions, often by local operators, alongside national players who naturally want a bigger share of the market. In every country you find both, and both are necessary. National operators play an important role as long as they don’t crowd out regional competition, and regional operators still depend on national players for backbone connectivity to reach other areas. A genuine single market, in that sense, isn’t about eliminating local relevance, it’s about removing the structural fragmentation that prevents either type of player from investing and scaling effectively.
– In June, the Dutch Data Center Association published its State of the Dutch Data Centers 2026 report. Why should Polish telecom entrepreneurs read it, what can they learn from it, and what were its most important conclusions?
– The report has been published annually for more than ten years, which makes it a valuable long-term record of how the Dutch data center industry has evolved. This year’s edition makes one thing especially clear: the industry is still growing, but it’s increasingly constrained by an energy grid that can’t keep pace with that growth.
That’s the central lesson for Polish telecom entrepreneurs. I can’t say whether Poland is already facing similar grid constraints, but if expansion plans run into long grid-connection waiting times, the Dutch experience shows the value of getting ahead of the problem – adopting technologies and practices that help the industry become part of the solution to grid capacity, rather than another source of strain on it.
The report also offers a useful read on where the market is heading. Despite the dominant narrative around AI-driven demand, conventional colocation data centers are still being built across the Netherlands, and cloud-supported facilities continue to grow alongside them. It also addresses emerging cooling technologies – liquid cooling, air cooling, immersion cooling – giving a sense of where the industry is headed technically. It’s an independent report produced by the industry itself, which is exactly what gives it credibility.
Ultimately, all of this points to the same conclusion: the stakeholders across the digital industry – data centers, fiber networks, energy providers, and policymakers – are already finding ways to work together. That collaboration is the key to Europe’s digital future.
