Inside Poland’s Push to Become Europe’s Next AI Powerhouse

Poland’s Beyond.pl data center campus is a hub for cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. (Business Wire)

Key Points

• Poland is experiencing an artificial-intelligence boom thanks in part to U.S. hyperscaler investments.
• The Polish government aims to increase venture capital investments in the domestic AI sector by 50% by 2030.
• U.S. tech giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon are investing billions of dollars to expand cloud and AI infrastructure in Poland.

Polish entrepreneur Piotr Surma once questioned whether he should move his AI start-up from Warsaw to Silicon Valley. Not anymore.

An artificial-intelligence boom is under way in Poland, and Surma isn’t the only one placing bets on it. As American hyperscalers pump money into AI infrastructure in Poland and people ditch jobs in the U.S. to return to their home country, investors will see more opportunities arise in what might be Europe’s next AI powerhouse.

“We see people coming from Silicon Valley back to Poland,” Surma says, founder and CEO of Warsaw-based Ingenix.ai, a biotech and AI start-up. His company has poached employees who had left Poland to work in the U.S., and now he gets job applications from workers with AI degrees and product experience at big tech companies.

It isn’t just the private sector leading the charge. The Polish government has outlined several AI priorities, including targeting a 50% increase in venture capital investments in the AI sector by 2030, and pushing its position as the “Heart of the AI Continent” through business innovation and investment. A government policy memo June 2025 on AI policy contends that “Poland will emerge on the international stage as a significant exporter of safe and trustworthy AI products and services.”

Last year, Poland surpassed the $1 trillion milestone in annual output in 2025, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. It currently ranks as the world’s 21st largest economy, just behind Switzerland, according to the International Monetary Fund.

AI could give the economy its next big boost. According to a June report from the World Bank, AI could increase Poland’s real gross domestic product by up to 12.1% in the next five to 10 years. The gains, however, would likely come from productivity rather than technological breakthroughs. Already, Poland is home to Beyond.pl, Central and Eastern Europe’s first locally-owned AI infrastructure, housed in Poznań and powered by Nvidia computing hardware.

A government agency known as KRiBSI oversees the AI boom by offering local regulations to support projects. Warsaw in late July committed over $106 million in a bid to host one of the EU’s new AI gigafactories.

U.S. companies continue to place bets on AI momentum, too, as demand surges in Poland and Europe more broadly for cloud infrastructure and tech among companies there.

Microsoft has spent $1.7 billion to expand cloud and AI infrastructure in Poland, launching the country’s first hyperscaler data center near Warsaw in 2023.

“I’m very confident that Poland has everything to become a European AI hub,” Iwona Szylar, Microsoft Poland’s general manager, said in an interview.

Alphabet’s Google signed an agreement in February 2025 with the Polish government to speed up the adoption of AI. And just in May, Amazon.com announced in May that it would invest over $5 billion between 2026 and 2028 in Poland, including in building a new AI-driven smart warehouse.

Still, its AI market is small compared with leading markets: Poland is home to 112 data centers compared with 4,767 in the U.S., and 2,983 in Western Europe, according to Data Center Map, a global online directory and research tool.

But things are changing rapidly. Filip Vurdelja, a New York-based investor who previously worked at BlackRock, returns to his native Poland every few months. Advancements are more pronounced with each visit, he said in an interview. After spending nearly four years as a partner in an early-stage tech firm in New York, Vurdelja launched his own venture-capital firm—called AGX—to invest in Polish start-ups that are rooted in advanced engineering or scientific research.

“Once you come here, you realize that Poland—and Warsaw in particular—is one big construction place,” he says*.* “Everywhere you look there’s a new building being built. The infrastructure buildup is very tangible.”

Meanwhile, the younger generation is being educated on coding and tech skills, and a new wave of Polish teenagers—sometimes still in high school—are building their own start-ups, according to Vurdelja.

Poles who return after working for overseas tech companies are also bringing unique skill sets and experiences with product management. Microsoft’s Szylar, who is originally from Poland, followed the same path as many of her peers, returning last year after spending years living in Asia and Australia.

This is all good news for investors looking for emerging AI markets like Poland. “The opportunities for investors are really, really ripe, and the market is significantly less crowded out than in other places like the United States or the Middle East,” Pablo Rasmussen, a director at geopolitical consulting firm Brzezinski Global Strategies, said in an interview.

Poland’s public markets haven’t caught up to the AI boom yet, since most of the companies are private. The Warsaw Stock Exchange, also known as WIG, is trailing behind South Korea and Taiwan, two countries that are also boosting local AI capabilities. But South Korea and Taiwan markets are dominated by AI companies. The WIG is up 30% so far this year, compared with 62% for the KOSPI, and a 14% gain for the S&P 500.

U.S. investors can get broad exposure to Polish stocks through the iShares MSCI Poland exchange-traded fund, which is the country’s only pureplay U.S.-listed ETF. Among the companies in the ETF, which is passively managed, is PKO Bank Polski, Orlen, the largest energy and oil company in Central and Eastern Europe, and Bank Pekao. Allegro, an online e-commerce platform, was the WIG’s largest-ever IPO in 2020.

“We observe a huge appetite from both public and private sectors when it comes to adoption of emerging technologies,” Microsoft’s Szylar says*.* “We already see world-class examples of AI adoption in Poland, specifically in the financial sector and in the energy sector.”

Brzezinski Global’s Rasmussen says there may be opportunities for investors to get in on the boom through supply chains, including construction company Budimex, which has plans to own and operate data centers in Poland.

Investors should keep an eye on AI start-ups that could go public in the next five to 10 years. Some of the biggest names include ElevenLabs, an AI audio company with a majority American customer base; Nomagic, which builds robots to automate warehouse tasks, and Synerise, an AI platform to track behavioral data.

Of course, there are risks. The World Bank warns that Poland has structural constraints that limit the “scale, speed, and inclusiveness” of AI. Adoption rates also need to rise—only 8% of Polish businesses use AI.

“The challenge is not access to AI,” says Ary Naïm, World Bank Group Country Manager for Poland. “It is using the technology productively—mobilizing investment in infrastructure and skills that underpin future growth, from digital networks to energy, water, and education.”

But expectations remain high. “There’s really not many other places that present better opportunities to build right now than Poland,” Vurdelja says. “Poland’s success has gone unnoticed for so many years.”

Write to Molly Bordoff at molly.bordoff@barrons.com

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