Kozani's central square has everything one would expect from a small Greek town. There is an Orthodox church, the town hall and a row of taverns and cafes. Very little indicates that it is at the center of a transition with much at stake for the country, Bloomberg writes.
Where lignite was once piled up to supply a power plant near Kozani, the Public Power Corporation SA plans to build one of Europe's largest data centers. It is part of an investment of 5.8 billion euros, aimed at transforming the former lignite-bearing mining area into a hub of technology and clean energy.
It is also the kind of project that has sparked protest movements from Sacramento to Scotland, amid claims that it consumes excessive amounts of electricity, water and land.
In Kozani, however, it is being seen as a potential lifeline, as a test of Europe's ability to develop such infrastructure in a region that may actually welcome a data center, but also of trust in the Greek government ahead of elections expected next spring.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has fully invested in Kozani's regional regeneration. Beyond the hopes of one of Greece's poorest regions, this also reflects the revival of PPC, which raised capital from the stock market this year.
The company, whose main shareholder is the Greek state, represents about 40% of the economic output of Western Macedonia and the goal is to ensure that most of this is replaced by new economic activity.
"The most important thing is to give prospects to the region," said Theodoros Pilalidis, a retiree in Kozani, who worked for 33 years in PPC's lignite mines. "So far, this is not happening."
Indeed, residents complain that since the government announced in 2019 the end of lignite-fired power units, the jobs required to mitigate the impact have still not been created.
Mitsotakis said during his visit to the region last month that more and better jobs will be created, as he pledged "to mobilize all available European resources, so that we can support Western Macedonia in this truly difficult transition."
Meanwhile, the lignite plant of Agios Dimitrios, 18 kilometers from Kozani, has ceased operations. PPC said that 58 employees remain there, compared with 420 at the beginning of the year.
Lignite mining, meanwhile, has almost been completed, with the remaining lignite being used to supply PPC's other large unit in the region, Ptolemaida V. This unit will stop using lignite by the end of the year.
Kozani mayor Giannis Kokkaliaris praised the data center and the energy projects planned for his area. However, he expressed doubts about whether they will be enough to offset job losses.
"No one says that the units should not close, but they must tell us exactly what will happen the next day in our region," the 49-year-old mayor said in an interview in his office in July, before Mitsotakis's visit. "If there were a corresponding business that would be better for the environment, with 3,000 employees and the same or similar wages, there would be no problem."
Kozani is above all a "company town." Everyone knows someone who works at PPC or a relative of theirs who works there. At its peak, in 2010, PPC employed about 5,500 people in the region of Western Macedonia. The area is also known for its saffron, although that sector employs a fraction of the workforce.
"We are ready for the next step," said 50-year-old Paraskevi Georgiou, who works at the Ptolemaida power plant. Her father was also a PPC employee and she herself has worked at the company since 2010. "So far, PPC has not shown us that it has abandoned us or that it is not by our side or that it will leave us to an uncertain future."
If one walks a little farther from Kozani's busy central square, the shuttered shops testify to better times in the past.
About 650 shops out of a total of 1,500 have now closed, said Athanasios Dragatsikos, head of Kozani's merchants' association and owner of a department store in the city center. Young people are leaving the region in waves.
"The worst thing you can do to people is make them feel despair," Dragatsikos said on the top floor of his department store. "All these years they have seen nothing, not even a little light."
The government and PPC say that this is about to change, as Greece develops its infrastructure to meet the demand created by artificial intelligence.
The company, whose future had been thrown into doubt when Greece decided to phase out lignite, will develop the 300 MW data center in Kozani by the end of 2028, alongside green energy projects in the region. The center will be designed with the possibility of expansion to 1 GW by 2031.
PPC is currently in talks with so-called hyperscalers in order to find a company that will lease the data center. One of the key advantages of the proposal is that power supply will be provided through PPC's regional energy network, under a long-term power purchase agreement, without putting pressure on the Greek electricity grid. The data center is expected to need about 0.6% of the amount of water required by lignite activities, according to PPC.
Demand for data centers in Europe continues to accelerate, driven by artificial intelligence. However, growth is increasingly constrained by energy availability and network readiness, according to the European Data Centre Association. The number of data centers worldwide has increased from 500,000 in 2021 to about 8 million today, while electricity consumption has nearly doubled from 2022 to 2026.
"The multiplier effects on the economy from the creation of a data center are very large," said Alexandros Soumelidis, former director of one of the units near Kozani, who now oversees PPC's development projects in the region.
Residents are also no strangers to environmental impacts. For decades, they had grown used to living in a place where, for much of the time, smoke from coal burning replaced the clouds. What concerns them is whether there will be jobs that will stem the outflow to Athens or Thessaloniki, Greece's largest cities, or abroad.
"We welcome every investment that comes here — these are jobs," said Giannis Fasidis, president of PPC's "Spartakos" labor union. There is only one thing that is non-negotiable, he said: every project must be carried out by PPC employees.
Today, PPC employs about 1,250 workers in the region. At the peak of construction work, about 7,500 workers will be required, Soumelidis said. The projects will create at least 2,200 permanent jobs, of which 1,500 people will be required for the operation of the data center when it reaches 1 GW, he said.
The transition has also been designed to shift the focus of the local economy toward startups and IT businesses.
PPC is working with the University of Western Macedonia in Kozani to create training programs that will help students become specialists in the fields that the new projects will require. Just as the company created a satellite economy around lignite mining and electricity generation, so too will the next one develop around the new data center, said Theodoros Theodoulidis, rector of the university.
"What the region lacks is a major investment that will change the psychology," said Theodoulidis, whose father was a lignite miner. Beyond PPC's projects, there is nothing else, "so we must embrace this major investment."