How long does it take to plug a data centre into the grid?

Everyone publishes GPU prices. Nobody publishes whether you can get the power to run them.

2 to 773

Days to connect a medium-voltage load in Germany — depending on nothing but whose network territory you build in. Same country, same regulator, a 386× difference.

fastest, days

126

median, days

773

slowest, days

251

operators

Where the 251 German operators fall

under a month

one to four months

four to twelve months

104

over a year

26 operators take over a year. 25 take under a month. Picking the wrong side of a boundary can cost more time than the build itself.

What this number is, and isn't. Every figure here is published by the operator or regulator. The regulator publishes it per operator for reporting year 2024, updated annually. The underlying field is named minDauer — which may mean a minimum rather than an average, while the regulator's own announcement calls it an average. Read it as a typical duration, not a floor anyone can be held to.

Czechia — where you can still connect

A different measure, because Czechia publishes a different thing: capacity to draw power, banded against a 10 MW threshold, per municipality.

2,188

room above 10 MW

1,045

room up to 10 MW

798

restricted

2,227

nobody publishes

What we don't know

Listed because it's real, and because a dataset that hides its gaps isn't worth reading.

Nobody publishes how much power you can draw in Prague. The city's operator maps generation only.
South Moravia and South Bohemia are missing. That operator blocks automated access, so their data has to be asked for, not taken.
Slovakia, Hungary and Poland aren't covered yet.
0 observations are marked stale — a source stopped publishing them, so they're excluded from everything above rather than quietly shown.

Need power sooner than this says?

Tell us where, how much, and by when. We'll put the request to operators and providers who may have capacity — including, disclosed plainly, our launch partner. If we can't help, we'll say so.

Know something we've got wrong? Corrections are the fastest way this improves, and we'd rather be corrected than confident.

The extremes

The 20 slowest and 5 fastest of 251 operators. The full set is in the dataset.

Network operator	Days	Band
EWE NETZ GmbH	773d	over a year
Stadtwerke Verden GmbH	760d	over a year
Stadtwerke Karlsruhe Netzservice GmbH	730d	over a year
Stadtwerke Soest GmbH	600d	over a year
Stadtwerke Bamberg Energie- und Wasserversorgungs GmbH	578d	over a year
Celle-Uelzen Netz GmbH	560d	over a year
Stadtwerke Neuwied GmbH	560d	over a year
Stadtwerke Witten Mittelspannungsnetz GmbH	543d	over a year
E.DIS Netz GmbH	510d	over a year
Schleswig-Holstein Netz GmbH	504d	over a year
Freiberger Stromversorgung GmbH	465d	over a year
Stadtwerke Ludwigsfelde GmbH	450d	over a year
Stromnetz Berlin GmbH	449d	over a year
Stadtwerke - Altm. Gas-, Wasseru.Elektrizitätswerke GmbH Stendal	427d	over a year
FairNetz GmbH	424d	over a year
Stadtwerke Merseburg GmbH	421d	over a year
Stadtwerke Weißenfels Energienetze GmbH	421d	over a year
Technische Werke Naumburg GmbH	421d	over a year
Stadtwerke Dülmen GmbH	412d	over a year
Stadtwerke Riesa GmbH	402d	over a year
… 226 operators between …
Netze BW GmbH	2d	under a month
Stadtwerke Lippe-Weser Service GmbH & Co. KG	2d	under a month
Stromnetzgesellschaft Herrenberg mbH & Co. KG	2d	under a month
Stadtwerke Ochtrup	3d	under a month
Stadtwerke Waiblingen GmbH	4d	under a month