Brinell Compute to Begin Construction of €3B AI Data Center in Bulgaria This Fall

German data center developer Brinell Compute has confirmed that construction of its artificial intelligence data center in the municipality of Maritsa, southern Bulgaria, will commence this autumn. The project, backed by a total investment of €3 billion ($3.4 billion), marks one of the largest technology infrastructure commitments in the Balkan region to date.

The facility will be developed on a 2,000-acre (809-hectare) site within the Rakovski Industrial Zone, located north of the city of Plovdiv. While Brinell has not disclosed the estimated compute capacity of the data center, local government officials quoted by Blitz.bg emphasized that the site will not serve as a conventional manufacturing hub. "This is a specialized data center with enormous computing power and supercomputers, where complex algorithms are trained, and data sets are processed," the officials said.

The announcement follows earlier developments in January, when Bulgaria's Council of Ministers signed a memorandum of understanding with Brinell Compute during a session held on January 21. The agreement formalized both parties' intent to jointly develop the data center in the region. Although the ultimate corporate users of the facility remain unnamed, economic.bg reported that negotiations between the developer and several US technology firms are currently underway.

Brinell Compute, registered in Munich in September 2025, claims to manage more than 4GW of energy infrastructure and holds €2.5 billion ($2.84 billion) in financing to support future projects. The company's entry into Bulgaria comes at a time when the country's data center market, home to roughly 30 facilities according to DataCenterMap, is considered relatively mature for Eastern Europe yet has attracted few new foreign investors. That trend may be shifting, however. In May, Bulgarian politician Tomislav Donchev announced that the government had authorized three new data center projects, including one with German firm Schwarz Digits, another with an unnamed German company—presumably Brinell Compute—and a third with a major US developer.

The Maritsa project underscores a broader push by European developers to expand AI-ready infrastructure in emerging markets within the region. As demand for high-performance computing and large-scale algorithm training grows, investments such as Brinell's could position Bulgaria as a strategic hub for data-intensive workloads, while also stimulating local economic activity and infrastructure development. The coming months will be critical as construction gets underway and further details on capacity and prospective tenants are expected to emerge.