Power at the Fence
Why Cypher Capital and Storm Group are building a European powered-land platform
By Reza Nedjatian, Chief Executive Officer, Storm Group, and Arash Saidi, Chief Executive Officer, Cypher Capital | 5th October 2026
Frankfurt, Europe’s second-largest data-centre market, expects no new grid capacity to be allocated before 2030. Amsterdam is capped until then. Across Europe’s established hubs - Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, known as FLAP-D - vacancy has fallen to 6.4%, from 16.9% in 2021, and most new capacity is let before it is finished.
Europe’s AI build-out does not have a demand problem, and it does not have a capital problem. It has a power problem. In August, one of us argued that the AI race will be won by whoever can power the chips, not whoever buys the most of them (Whoever Powers the Chips Wins the Race). In Europe, the question has become where the power can be found at all.
The answer is increasingly outside the core. The average greenfield data-centre site now sits around 175 km from its hub city, against 46 km three years ago. Operators are not leaving the core markets because they want to. They are leaving because the core markets cannot connect them to the grid this decade. The destination is Europe’s second tier: the Nordics, Iberia, northern Italy, and Central and Eastern Europe - markets with power headroom and land that has not yet been repriced for what it could become.
Where The Value Sits
Between a field and a live data centre there are five steps: the right land, control of it, a firm grid connection, planning consent, and energisation. The first and last are well understood. The value - and the risk - sits in the middle. A parcel with no grid position is priced as farmland or industrial land. The same parcel with a credible grid position and the consents to use it is priced as infrastructure. Nothing about the soil has changed. What has changed is that someone has done the work.
That work is slow and local. It means relationships with the grid operators who decide who gets capacity and when, knowing how each national planning regime treats a data-centre application, and the discipline to walk away when a site’s power story does not survive diligence. Capital does not shortcut any of it.
The Land is Bought Once
There is a question every infrastructure investor asks about AI: is this a bet on chips? Servers and GPUs are replaced every three to five years, and the operators who buy them live with each generation’s economics. The land underneath them, and the grid connection that feeds it, is bought once. Whichever chip wins, and whoever runs it, it will need a permitted site with power. That is the layer this platform is built around.
Power That Already Exists
Not every megawatt has to come out of a new grid queue. Europe’s industrial restructuring has left behind steel works, paper mills and chemical plants that still hold a grid connection and a substation sized for a load that no longer exists. With the right diligence - that the connection transfers with the land, that the capacity has not lapsed, that the site can change use - a closed plant can reach permit-ready years ahead of a greenfield site in the same region. Finding those sites is relationship work too: grid operators, receivers, lenders and local advisers often see them long before they are marketed.
Two Kinds of Expertise
This is why Storm Group and Cypher Capital have come together, each doing what it does best.
Storm Group is the developer. Its team originates land where power is available or obtainable, secures the grid position, and carries each site through permitting to the point at which an operator - a hyperscaler, a colocation provider or an AI-focused neocloud - can build. Storm’s founding team has developed, energised and operated more than 550 MW of power and digital infrastructure, and it now brings that discipline to Europe.
Cypher Capital is the capital partner. We structure the vehicles, manage investor relationships and bring institutional capital to opportunities that most allocators cannot originate themselves.
Most of the capital looking for AI infrastructure sits with investors who cannot do the development work themselves. Most of the people who can do that work do not have institutional capital behind them. Putting the two together is the point.
The Next Step
Cypher Capital has begun pre-marketing the proposed Cypher European Data Center Opportunities Fund to professional investors in the European Union: a Luxembourg vehicle designed to buy European sites early and carry them to permit-ready, with Storm Group as developer.
Pre-marketing means exactly what it says. The fund has not yet been established, its terms are indicative, and they will be shaped by what professional investors tell us over the coming weeks. Any participation will be available only on the basis of final offering documents, and only to eligible professional investors.
The timing is not accidental. Commissioned data-centre capacity in Europe has grown roughly fivefold since 2019, to around 15 GW, and the European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act targets at least a tripling of EU capacity within five to seven years. The grid will catch up eventually - on the utilities’ own schedules, in the 2030s. Until then, the scarcest asset in European digital infrastructure is not the chip, the building or the capital. It is the permit-ready megawatt.
Europe does not lack demand, and it does not lack money. It lacks sites that can actually be switched on - and that is the work we do.”
Reza Nedjatian, Chief Executive Officer, Storm Group
“The question infrastructure investors ask us most is whether AI data centres are a bet on chips. The chips will change every few years. The permitted, powered site underneath them is a different kind of asset: every generation will need one. Our role is to pair Storm’s delivery experience with the structure institutional investors need to reach it.”
Arash Saidi, Chief Executive Officer, Cypher Capital
About Cypher Capital
Cypher Capital is a multi-asset investment manager investing across digital assets, AI infrastructure and private equity. The firm manages fund and managed account strategies for institutional investors, structures access to AI infrastructure opportunities developed by its affiliate, Storm Group, and invests in differentiated private equity opportunities targeting the technologies reshaping the real economy, led by artificial intelligence and robotics. For more information, visit cyphercapital.com.
About Storm Group
Storm Group is an infrastructure development platform addressing Europe’s data-centre supply gap. Storm originates land and power, secures grid connections and carries sites through permitting, delivering powered, permit-ready capacity for hyperscale, colocation and AI operators. Storm Group is headquartered in Switzerland. For more information, visit stormgroup.com.
This is a marketing communication. This article is issued by Cypher Capital (BVI) Limited (“Cypher Capital”) and is provided for general information purposes only. It is directed exclusively at professional investors within the meaning of Annex II of Directive 2014/65/EU, and at equivalent categories of institutional or qualified investors in jurisdictions where receipt of this information is lawful. It is not addressed to retail investors in any jurisdiction.
Cypher European Data Center Opportunities Fund (the “Fund”) is proposed to be formed in Luxembourg as a reserved alternative investment fund, organised as a special limited partnership (société en commandite spéciale). The Fund has not been established. Pre-marketing of the Fund is carried out only to professional investors in the EU, for which a pre-marketing notification has been made to the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (“CSSF”) by Royalton Partners S.A., a licensed alternative investment fund manager (“AIFM”), authorised in Luxembourg. Enquiries about the regulatory structure of the proposed Fund and its pre-marketing should be addressed to the AIFM, copying the representatives of the proposed Fund.
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