Capacity Europe 2026 Preview

It’s definitely busy season at Temono Towers as September’s run of events rolls right on into October, and next up for me is Capacity Europe.

More than 4,000 people are expected at the InterContinental London at The O2 this year, spanning carriers, fibre operators, data centres, cloud, hyperscalers, investors and plenty more besides. As a digital infrastructure comms agency, that’s a pretty good cross-section of our sweet spot.

I’ll be there for Temono this year and, alongside plenty of conversations with clients and peers, there are a few themes on the agenda I’m particularly interested in.

AI inevitably sits at the centre of much of it. The interesting question for me is whether the conversation can get beyond simply telling us how much demand AI is creating.

The AI story needs some nuts and bolts

AI has given almost every corner of digital infrastructure a growth story.

More compute needs more data centres. Those data centres need power and connectivity. New AI clusters need huge amounts of fibre capacity between them. All of that needs investment, land, planning and customers willing to pay for it.

Capacity's programme reflects that, with AI infrastructure running across the fibre, data centre, cloud and investment agendas.

One session I’m particularly keen to catch is Wiring the AI Boom, which brings together euNetworks, EXA Infrastructure, Retelit and Verizon to look at fibre corridors, dark fibre, network design and where capacity will be needed for AI training and inference. Everyone can say they enable AI (or at least, try to). Far fewer companies can clearly explain which bit of the infrastructure problem they solve, where the commercial opportunity sits and why their approach is different. For those of us working in communications, there is a challenge in separating the companies with a credible role in this market from those simply adding AI to the first paragraph of every press release.

Digital infrastructure is getting harder to put into neat boxes

Capacity itself looks quite different from the wholesale telecoms event it started out as 25 years ago.

The attendee mix now runs across connectivity, data centres, cloud, hyperscale platforms, investment and emerging technologies. The opening Beyond Silos session is bringing Colt, Digital Realty, Equinix, NTT DATA and Google together to discuss how those different parts of the infrastructure market increasingly work alongside each other.

That creates an interesting positioning problem. Plenty of businesses in this sector now do considerably more than the category they are best known for. The company may have evolved through acquisitions, partnerships or new services while its external story still sounds much the same as it did five years ago.

Capacity is a good place to see that play out because you have so many adjacent parts of the industry in the same building. Everyone is competing for attention from a lot of the same customers, partners, investors and journalists. Clear positioning becomes pretty useful in a room like that.

Getting permission to build

One session I’m interested in from a personal perspective is Licence to Operate, looking at public opposition, planning and how infrastructure companies can win support from governments and communities. Telehouse, Khazna, Ark Data Centres and Greenscale are on the panel, followed by roundtables asking what wins local support and whether the industry needs a more united approach to its social licence.

It is rare to see communications issues set out quite so explicitly on a digital infrastructure conference agenda. Data centres in particular are much more visible to the wider public than they were a few years ago. New developments bring questions about power, water, land, jobs and the impact on local communities. Those questions are being asked by councils, politicians, national media and people who may never previously have given much thought to the infrastructure behind their internet connection.

The industry needs good answers.

There is an obvious role here for communications teams. Explaining megawatts, racks and network capacity will only get you so far. Companies also need a compelling way to explain why new infrastructure should be built, what it enables and what the community gets from having it nearby.

I’m interested to hear how far operators think that responsibility should sit with individual companies and how far the industry needs to tell that story collectively.

Resilience is getting a wider audience too

Security and resilience have been familiar Capacity themes for years, especially around subsea networks. This year's agenda puts them alongside sovereignty, geopolitics and questions about who owns and controls critical infrastructure. Sessions cover route diversity, physical infrastructure threats and how security concerns influence where networks are built and interconnected.

That gives communications teams another tricky balancing act. Resilience and sovereignty are useful words until everybody starts using them. Companies need evidence behind the claims and a way to explain fairly technical infrastructure decisions to audiences well beyond network engineers. The same goes for the wider AI conversation. More mainstream attention brings a bigger opportunity to tell the industry's story, while making vague claims much easier to spot.

Someone still has to make the numbers work

There is plenty of money talk on the agenda too. Capacity has a dedicated Digital Infrastructure Finance and Investment Summit this year, covering capital across data centres, fibre, energy and connectivity, while the main programme includes discussions around fibre valuations, funding and consolidation.

That should provide a useful counterweight to some of the enormous forecasts attached to AI infrastructure. The European fibre market in particular has had no shortage of ambitious build plans over the last few years. Attention on valuations, returns and consolidation makes the commercial story around those networks just as interesting as the technical one. It also gives companies another reason to think carefully about how they position themselves. In a crowded market, having a recognisable story and a clear explanation of where you create value helps with more than press coverage.

See you at The O2

There is plenty on the agenda I want to catch, although I suspect some of the best conversations will happen nowhere near a stage.

That has always been the appeal of events like Capacity.

You get customers, prospects, partners, journalists, analysts and investors in one place, with enough time around the programme to meet people properly. For Temono, it is a great chance to hear first-hand which issues companies are wrestling with, what stories are starting to cut through and which industry talking points could do with a refresh.

If you’re going too and fancy a coffee, or a chat about any of the above, book 15 minutes in my diary.