Data centres, batteries, agri-tech: what will be built over the next ten years?

The past decade belonged to logistics: warehouse halls went up wherever there was a motorway junction. The demand of the coming ten years, however, will come from elsewhere, and it is looking for entirely different site characteristics.

Energy capacity is the new motorway

What data centres and battery manufacturing have in common is that they are primarily buying megawatts rather than land. The first question in site selection today is no longer the number of loading docks, but the distance to the supply point and the available grid capacity. A site with a demonstrable energy connection is worth considerably more than a neighbouring plot that looks comparable on paper.

Water, data, knowledge

Precision agriculture and the new generation of food processing are looking for proximity to water resources and research institutions. The industrial park of the future is not a row of halls but an ecosystem: energy, water, data connectivity and a skilled workforce in one place.

These questions have to be answered now, not when the investor is already sitting in a competitor's office.