The Open Compute Project’s EMEA Summit has undergone a transformation that stands out even against the event’s longer history. First held in 2014 in Paris, the Summit has long served as Europe’s home for open infrastructure collaboration — but the growth from 2024 to 2026 marks a step change in a different category. What was a focused regional gathering of 725 people in Lisbon has grown into a 2,110-strong flagship event in Barcelona — nearly tripling in size, almost doubling its sponsor base, and expanding its reach to 52 countries across six continents. The next edition heads to Hamburg, Germany, 6–8 April 2027, and if the trajectory of the past three years is any guide, it will be the biggest yet. Sponsorship opportunities are already open, and the community is actively preparing content well ahead of the Call for Participation — now is the time to get involved. The numbers are striking. The story behind them is even more so.
Three Years, Three Cities, One Clear Trajectory
2024 — Lisbon, Portugal: Laying the Foundation
The 2024 OCP EMEA Regional Summit set the baseline. Held in Lisbon, Portugal, it drew 725 attendees from 315 organisations and 33 countries — at the time, the largest EMEA event OCP had ever hosted. Seventy-one percent of the crowd came from the EMEA region itself, with North America (24%) and Asia Pacific (5%) making up the rest.
The programme reflected the early ambitions of an event finding its identity: 190 speakers delivered 163 sessions across 9 breakout tracks, including three Special Focus Tracks on OpenRAN, Optics for AI Clusters, and Quantum. A half-day AI session, a Future Technologies Symposium focused on sustainability and AI/HPC, an Innovation Village with six stations, and a colocated SONiC workshop hosted by Stordis rounded out the agenda. Forty-one sponsors and 25 Expo Hall booths filled the exhibition floor.
The attendee profile skewed technical and senior: engineers (19%) and senior executives (18%) led the breakdown, followed by business development (17%) and technology architects (10%).
Thirty-three countries were represented — from Austria and Belgium through to Taiwan, the UAE, and the United States.
2025 — Dublin, Ireland: Breaking Into a New League
A year later in Dublin, everything grew — fast. Attendance jumped 57% to 1,141, sponsors increased to 60, and the expo expanded to 47 booths. The number of organisations represented rose to 443, and the country count climbed to 40.
The programme scaled accordingly. Eleven breakout tracks — up from nine — included Special Focus Tracks on OpenRAN and Photonics, plus a dedicated half-day on AI. The speaker count rose to 233 across 189 sessions. The Future Technologies Symposium added Quantum to its Sustainability and AI/HPC focus, and featured live technology demonstrations in the expo hall.
The regional breakdown shifted slightly — 67% EMEA, 26% North America, 7% Asia Pacific — reflecting growing international interest. New countries joined the programme: Kenya, Egypt, and the Republic of Korea appeared in the attendee list alongside returning delegations from across Europe, North America, and Asia.
The Dublin edition also saw a shift in the attendee mix. Engineers and senior executives tied at 18% each, while marketing and operations (13%) and business development (11%) grew — a sign that the Summit was attracting not just builders but buyers and strategists.
2026 — Barcelona, Spain: The Largest EMEA Event in OCP History
Barcelona arrived with the energy of an event that had found its moment. Under the theme Leading the Future of AI, the 2026 OCP EMEA Summit drew 2,110 attendees — an 85% increase on Dublin and a 191% increase on Lisbon. Sponsors reached 86, Expo Hall booths 73.
The programme hit a new scale: 325 speakers across 190 sessions, 12 breakout tracks including Special Focus Tracks on Photonics and Quantum, and a colocated half-day workshop hosted by the SONiC Foundation and STORDIS. The Future Technologies Symposium awarded its $10,000 best paper prize to Rittal and Vision Electric Super Conductors for “Meeting AI Power Density at Scale: Superconducting Distribution for Multi-MW Data Halls” — a title that captures the technical urgency driving the entire event.
Attendees now came from more than 750 organisations and 52 countries. The geographic mix: 70.6% EMEA, 22.4% North America, 6.8% Asia Pacific, and 0.2% Caribbean and Latin America. New countries in the 2026 list — Andorra, Brazil, Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Thailand — illustrated just how far OCP’s European gathering had expanded its global draw.
The attendee profile in Barcelona leaned heavily technical: 47% held technical roles, including technology architects/strategists (19%), engineers (16%), R&D (6%), and data centre infrastructure (6%). Business development (27%) and senior executives (11%) made up the rest of the leadership cohort.
The Numbers at a Glance
|
Metric |
2024 — Lisbon |
2025 — Dublin |
2026 — Barcelona |
|
Attendees |
725 |
1,141 |
2,110 |
|
Sponsors |
41 |
60 |
86 |
|
Expo Hall Booths |
25 |
47 |
73 |
|
Speakers |
190 |
233 |
325 |
|
Sessions |
163 |
189 |
190 |
|
Breakout Tracks |
9 |
11 |
12 |
|
Organisations Represented |
315 |
443 |
750+ |
|
Countries Represented |
33 |
40 |
52 |
Total attendee growth, 2024–2026: +191%
What the Programme Tells Us
Beyond headcount, the evolution of the Summit’s content tracks the industry’s own shifting priorities.
In 2024, the agenda was broad but grounded: data centre sustainability, AI, security and data protection, power and cooling, and regional deployments of OCP-recognised hardware. Invited talks reached into quantum, optics, and telecommunications — forward-looking, but treated as emerging themes.
By 2025, AI had grown large enough to warrant its own dedicated half-day programme alongside the regular tracks. OpenRAN and Photonics earned Special Focus Track status. Quantum moved from invited talk territory into the Future Technologies Symposium as a standalone pillar.
In 2026, the language shifted further. The key emphasis areas were “AI and Cloud Data Centers,” “the next wave of AI: Inference in hyperscale adjacent data centers,” and the full integration of power, cooling, and deployment alongside security and sustainability. Photonics and Quantum held their Special Focus Tracks, and the FTS prize — awarded for work on superconducting distribution at multi-megawatt scale — signalled that the frontier conversations are now engineering conversations, not just research ones.
The breakout track count tells its own story: 9 in Lisbon, 11 in Dublin, 12 in Barcelona — with each year adding depth rather than just breadth.
The Market Behind the Momentum
The Summit’s growth does not occur in a vacuum. It is underwritten by one of the most significant waves of infrastructure investment the technology industry has ever seen — and OCP sits at the centre of it.
According to an IDC adoption study commissioned by the OCP Foundation and published in December 2025, total spending on OCP-recognised IT infrastructure and solutions is forecast to grow from US$132 billion in 2025 to US$295 billion in 2029, at a compound annual growth rate of 22.2%. Server spending alone is projected to reach $258.9 billion by 2029 (CAGR of 35.7%), while cooling technologies (CAGR of over 32%), power technologies (CAGR of 23.6%), and IT rack infrastructure (CAGR of 23.5%) represent the fastest-growing adjacent segments. AI infrastructure spending across the ecosystem is projected to reach approximately $155 billion by 2029, driven by GPU-accelerated servers deployed by hyperscalers, neocloud providers, and enterprise operators alike.
The OCP rack market offers a useful lens on Europe’s role in that expansion. Valued at USD 1.68 billion in 2025, the global OCP rack market is projected to reach USD 4.32 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 21.0%. The growth is being propelled by AI training and inference workloads, high-performance computing, and — increasingly — edge computing deployments, where OCP’s standardised, modular architectures enable rapid and consistent installation across distributed, space-constrained sites. For the EMEA region specifically, the combination of new hyperscale builds, expanding neocloud operations, and sovereign infrastructure investment is driving sustained demand for OCP-based hardware.
The OCP Community itself has scaled to match. It now comprises over 500 corporate members, nearly 200 active work efforts, and thousands of individual contributing engineers. Its membership has broadened beyond its original hyperscale core to include neoclouds, telecoms, financial services, manufacturing, and oil and gas — and its scope has expanded from greenfield data centre builds to brownfield retrofits and refurbishments. Twenty-three percent of that membership is now European, and 38% of OCP’s startup members are based in the region.
Europe’s Place in the Open Compute Ecosystem
For European operators, the Summit’s growth is both a reflection of and a catalyst for the region’s deepening engagement with open infrastructure.
IDC projects $15 billion in OCP-recognised equipment deployed across Europe by 2029. The 52 countries represented in Barcelona — spanning every significant European market, major Middle Eastern delegations, key Asia Pacific participants, and an emerging Latin American and Caribbean presence — suggest that the EMEA Summit is functioning less as a regional satellite of OCP’s global programme and more as an independent centre of gravity in its own right.
The Summit’s content has followed that trajectory. From its earliest Lisbon edition, the event has placed European-specific concerns — data centre sustainability regulation, energy efficiency, heat reuse, and the challenges of connecting large-scale AI infrastructure to European grid capacity — alongside the global technical agenda. As those concerns have intensified, so has attendance.
Looking Ahead: Hamburg 2027
With Barcelona confirmed as its largest EMEA event to date, OCP has announced that the 2027 EMEA Summit will move to Hamburg, Germany, running across three days from 6–8 April 2027 — the first time the event will span three full days, reflecting both the scale the Summit has reached and the depth of content the community now expects.
Hamburg is a fitting next chapter. As AI data centre investment accelerates across Europe, as liquid cooling moves from niche to standard, and as operators across the continent look to open hardware standards to navigate supply chain complexity, energy constraints, and regulatory change, the OCP EMEA Summit has become the gathering where that work gets done.
The trajectory — 725 to 1,141 to 2,110 — is not simply the result of good event management. It reflects a genuine convergence: of European investment in AI data centre infrastructure, of industry urgency around power, cooling, and hardware standardisation, and of a technical community that increasingly finds in OCP’s open model the fastest path from specification to deployment.
For companies that want to make the most of this event,, the moment to act is now. Sponsorship sales opened immediately after Barcelona closed — early movers secure the strongest visibility at an event that has more than doubled in size in two years. For technical contributors and practitioners, the path to Hamburg runs through the community itself: engaging early with the OCP community and its workstreams and preparing a submission for the Call for Participation is how the Summit’s agenda gets built, and the guidance for crafting a winning breakout submission is already available.
Three years ago, it was Europe’s most ambitious regional compute event. In 2027, in Hamburg, it will be something more.
Data sources: Official OCP “By the Numbers” posts for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 OCP EMEA Summits; the IDC/OCP Annual Adoption Study (December 2025); and Globe News Wire OCP rack market research.