WDP locks in 380MW of Romanian grid before calling it a project

Belgian logistics landlord Warehouses De Pauw holds an approved 380MW grid connection agreement for two possible data centers outside Bucharest, and it still will not call them a project. The caution from a warehouse developer is almost beside the point, because what WDP has actually secured is grid capacity nearly four times the 100MW that Romania's grid operator says the country's data centers draw today.

Profit.ro first reported the plan and Data Center Dynamics carried the details. The two facilities would rise in an industrial park WDP owns in Ștefăneștii de Jos, a commune in Ilfov County, the ring around Romania's capital where most of the country's data centers are concentrated. A 220kV transformer station would likely connect the site to the nearby Fundeni-Brazi Vest 1 overhead power line, and Lamas Invest, a firm owned by WDP Romania country manager Jeroen Biermans, would co-develop the project, according to Profit.ro. The facilities could open by 2030; IT compute capacity has not been disclosed.

WDP's spokesperson told Data Center Dynamics it is "still too early to speak of a concrete project" and could not confirm the specifics of Profit.ro's story, but the same statement sketched the logic at work: data centers are energy-intensive, power capacity is "a critical first step before any potential development can be considered," and WDP assesses such opportunities "across our European markets" alongside its core logistics business. That is the language of a company that understands the scarce input has shifted from capital to grid position.

Grid position has become the new deal currency in digital infrastructure, and consent has replaced capital as the deciding factor; Romania offers a compact illustration. DataCenterMap counts 65 operational data centers in the country, a market that trails only Poland's 112 facilities, while Transelectrica, Romania's grid operator, forecasts national data center power demand growing from about 100MW today to 370MW by 2030 and 680MW by 2035. The WDP approval is larger, on paper, than the 370MW the grid operator expects for the whole country in 2030. Even if WDP never builds a server room, that approved connection is a claim on a specific block of grid capacity.

WDP comes to this from logistics warehouses. Its Romanian portfolio spans 2 million sqm of warehouses and logistics hubs valued at €1.6 billion ($1.8 billion), and its last major investment in the country was a 32,000 sqm distribution center outside Bucharest. Moving from distribution boxes to data centers is a change of business, customer, and risk profile, but the asset WDP secured first—the 380MW grid connection—is the same asset that has become scarce in this cycle. The unbuilt data center is exposure; the approved connection is the piece that holds value even before a single megawatt is drawn.

The siting is as instructive as the power number. Ilfov County surrounds the capital, where demand is concentrated, and the proposed transformer station would attach to an existing 220kV overhead line, so WDP is starting from an industrial park it already owns rather than a greenfield site at the edge of a rural grid. In a period when data center projects stall over permitting and community opposition, that industrial park setting is effectively a pre-cleared consent path, and combined with the approved grid connection it is why a warehouse company can consider a data center at all.

Whether WDP builds, partners, or sells, the company has secured the two inputs that decide data center development in this cycle: a site with existing industrial use and an approved connection to the transmission network. The 380MW agreement is the kind of asset that a larger data center developer might want, and the industrial land gives WDP options in every direction. A logistics landlord that never operates a data center can still monetize the grid option by selling land and connection together, or by finding a partner to carry the compute risk.

None of this is certain. WDP says it cannot confirm the report; the 2030 timeline is conditional; the grid operator's forecast is a forecast. But the reporting shows the sequence clearly: the grid agreement came before the project was announced, before compute capacity was decided, and before WDP would call the development a project. Romania's grid map matters more than its data center map, and WDP just marked its spot on it.