Swiss private markets group Partners Group is preparing to invest more than $1 billion of equity in AVK Power Solutions, putting substantial institutional capital behind the increasingly difficult business of securing electricity for European data centres.

The investment manager has agreed to acquire a majority stake in UK-headquartered AVK, while the company’s management team will retain a minority holding. Debt financing will sit alongside the initial equity investment as Partners Group attempts to expand AVK from a supplier of power systems into a broader infrastructure platform offering long-term energy services to data centre operators.

AVK designs, installs, and maintains backup generators, modular electrical systems, microgrids, and other behind-the-meter power infrastructure. It says it has delivered more than 20,000 projects and installed approximately 3.5GW of power, while its development pipeline includes more than 2GW of behind-the-meter opportunities across Europe.

The company operates across Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin — the established FLAP-D data centre markets — as well as newer European locations where developers are looking for available land, grid capacity, and faster routes to commissioning. Partners Group says grid connections in the principal markets can now take between seven and 15 years, making access to electricity one of the harder constraints on new capacity.

Compute has become an energy infrastructure problem

European data centre expansion is no longer simply a property and connectivity question because the availability of power increasingly determines whether a site can proceed on the timetable developers want. AI workloads intensify that pressure through higher rack densities and greater aggregate electricity requirements, while utilities and transmission operators face their own queues for grid upgrades, generation projects, and industrial connections.

That collision between computing demand and electricity infrastructure is becoming a recurring feature of Europe’s AI build-out. Europe’s AI ambitions are already running into grid constraints, while projects from the Nordics to Germany are being shaped as much by access to energy as by processors or fibre.

Partners Group’s proposed solution is to put more generation behind the meter, allowing data centres to secure power without waiting for every requirement to be met through a conventional grid connection. AVK’s existing business includes microgrids and hybrid generation systems, while the investor plans to develop an Energy-as-a-Service model under which AVK would own power assets and sign long-term offtake agreements with operators.

The structure shifts part of the infrastructure burden from utilities towards private capital and specialist energy providers, although it does not remove the broader consequences created by data centre expansion. On-site generation still requires fuel, equipment, planning permission, environmental controls, and connection arrangements, while the carbon impact depends heavily on the technologies and fuels used at each site.

Speed-to-power becomes investable infrastructure

For private infrastructure investors, long connection queues can nevertheless create the conditions for a new class of contracted assets. Where a data centre operator is willing to pay for guaranteed power over a long period, generating and managing that electricity starts to resemble other infrastructure businesses built around predictable cash flows and long-term customer agreements.

Partners Group already has investments in decentralised European energy through Gren and Eteck, while it previously built and exited Nordic data centre platform atNorth. Its decision to combine those areas through AVK suggests that the power problem is being treated less as a temporary engineering bottleneck and more as an investable market in its own right.

The approach may also alter where new data centres are built. Locations with constrained utility connections but a viable route to private generation could become commercially practical sooner, whereas sites dependent entirely on distant grid upgrades may struggle to compete for projects whose customers want computing capacity within two or three years rather than a decade.

Europe’s push for greater cloud and AI sovereignty adds another layer because governments want more computing capacity inside the region while electricity networks are already absorbing electrification across transport, heating, manufacturing, and other industries. Expanding compute therefore becomes part of a wider contest for generation and network investment rather than an isolated technology policy exercise.

Partners Group’s planned investment makes that tension unusually concrete: more than $1 billion of equity is being directed not towards processors or software, but towards the machinery that allows data centres to obtain power while the public grid catches up. If connection queues remain this long, private energy infrastructure is likely to become one of the markets created by Europe’s expanding appetite for compute.