The first building of the Innovation District in Kragujevac, as part of the third phase of construction and development of the State Data Centre (SDC), is scheduled – at least according to official announcements – to open by September 20. Construction of this complex of information, innovation, creative and digital industries in southeastern Europe, as described by the authorities, began in late February 2024.
The complex, comprising nine buildings with a total floor area of 85,000 square metres, will span a 4.5-hectare site right next to the Data Centre itself. It will house a Science and Technology Park, the National Centre for Information Security, centres and laboratories for artificial intelligence, robotics and smart cities, along with business incubators and start-ups. Around 186 million euros – the estimated value of the investment – was pledged by the state under the “Jump into the Future – Serbia 2027” project, though this does not mean the entire complex will be completed next year. On the contrary, it is being built in phases, and it remains unknown when the final phase will be finished.
Is there enough power for Serbia’s ‘Silicon Valley’?
What is known is that the building scheduled to open soon covers around 4,700 square metres, with roughly 20 million euros invested in its construction and equipment. In addition, it has been announced that a second building will open early next year, while the foundation stone for the complex’s third building is set to be laid this month. The government has already boasted that the services and premises of the Innovation District will be used by global IT tech giants such as Oracle, Palo Alto Networks and Honeywell, with which contracts have already been signed, as well as numerous foreign and domestic companies that already store their data in the neighbouring SDC, which went into trial operation on December 18, 2020.
The Data Centre was built, as stated at the time, for the secure storage of data belonging to state authorities, local self-governments and commercial users. Built on a four-hectare plot, it consists of two buildings spanning 14,000 square metres, with a projected installed power capacity of 14 megawatts and a capacity of 1,080 rack cabinets. The first supercomputer was purchased in 2021, a second on April 30 of this year, and a third is scheduled to arrive from France by the end of 2026.
Mihailo Jovanović, Director of the Government Office for Information Technology and eGovernment, claims that with the Data Centre and the Innovation District, Kragujevac is becoming Serbia’s “Silicon Valley”. On the other hand, some independent experts warn that data centres are enormous consumers of electricity and water, making their contribution to community development rather questionable and potentially problematic. They caution that the accelerated development of artificial intelligence and cloud services could heavily strain the domestic power grid, which by September 14 of this year had already spent 225.5 million euros on electricity imports to meet domestic demand.
“The State Data Centre in Kragujevac has an installed capacity of around 14 megawatts, and if it operated at full capacity year-round, it would consume approximately 123 gigawatt-hours, which currently accounts for about 0.34 percent of total electricity generation in Serbia. If the SDC reaches 40 megawatts, annual consumption would jump to around 350 gigawatt-hours, while at maximum capacity of 56 megawatts, it would consume nearly 500 gigawatt-hours annually. This would mean a single data centre uses between 1 and 1.4 percent of total domestic power generation,” explained Branimir N. Grgur, a professor at the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy, speaking to Biznis.rs.
A single data centre uses as much electricity as the whole of Kragujevac
Meanwhile, the entire city of Kragujevac, excluding the data centre, consumes between 400 and 550 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually. The current 14-megawatt data centre has already increased power consumption by a quarter, and if its installed capacity were expanded to 56 megawatts, it alone would consume as much electricity as all other consumers in Kragujevac combined. In addition to the energy load, large data centres also generate significant thermal effects in local environments, Grgur points out.
In this regard, Radar reached out to State Data Centre Director Danilo Savić for comment on claims regarding excessive electricity consumption. Despite hints that Savić or one of his associates would comment on the claims, no response from the SDC had arrived by the time this issue went to print. In late April, however, when newly built solar panels were put into operation alongside the new supercomputer and modules three and four, it was stated that they would help save electricity, though the exact extent was not specified.
Mihailo Jovanović claims that the thermal energy released by the intensive operation of servers and computer equipment is already being used to heat the administrative section of the Data Centre, and that a project is underway to redirect excess thermal energy to Kragujevac’s district heating system. Time will tell how much of this is regime propaganda and how much is imminent reality.
Ahead of the SDC’s construction seven years ago, the public was informed that the marginalised and overlooked hub of Šumadija was chosen for the project because it “met the highest criteria for building a data centre.” At the same time, the nearest motorway to Kragujevac is Corridor 10, located a full 25 kilometres away, whereas much closer to the SDC are Zastava Arms, the Zastava TERVO military combat vehicle factory, the Medna Technical Repair Facility and other defence industry plants. Worst of all, the SDC and the Innovation District practically abut the largest and potentially most dangerous “chemical plant” in Šumadija: the unsanitary municipal landfill in the Jovanovac settlement.
Since its inception in 1968, this city dump has operated without an operating permit, and fires break out there periodically, especially during the summer months. Most recently, on August 7, as much as 70 ares of garbage burned, with fires extinguished by all available firefighter units, excavators, and trucks from the public utility company Šumadija and private firm Korman Put, according to local media reports. The dump, which faces a constant risk of explosion due to the presence of methane within a 15-hectare mound of waste, lies about 150 metres away from the Data Centre and the Innovation District.
Not a word from the authorities
Radar also contacted the management of the State Data Centre with questions regarding whether they had any knowledge that the Jovanovac landfill was to be relocated to another site, but there was no response. It remains unknown whether this is because the management and employees at the Data Centre are unbothered by the view and odours from the “dump,” as well as the risk of fire and, God forbid, a potential methane explosion, or for some other reason.
Miroslav Jovanović, editor-in-chief of the weekly Kragujevačke novine, who has covered this topic for years, tells Radar that Kragujevac has never had an orderly municipal waste landfill. Ever since 1968, a field at the edge of town, next to the road to the village of Jovanovac, has served that purpose, where city waste began to be dumped onto open land without any sanitary protection. Consequently, according to him, it has been treated from the start as an ordinary rubbish tip or dump rather than a proper landfill.
This is borne out by the fact that ever since it began forming in 1968 until today, it has never obtained an operating permit. Although Kragujevac has since doubled in population compared to the late 1960s and expanded even further spatially – with a new city centre taking shape just a few hundred metres from the Data Centre and the Innovation District around the new Palace of Justice – the Jovanovac landfill still retains the status of a dump, and by all accounts, it will remain there for some time yet.
Miroslav Jovanović also recalls that back in 2020, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced that Kragujevac and Niš, as part of the Serbian-Chinese Clean Serbia project, would receive modern regional landfills by Saint Nicholas Day, specifically December 19, 2021. Nothing came of that, of course.
Based on an official initiative four decades old, a new regional landfill in Kragujevac is slated for construction at the Vitlište location, in the valley between hills at the tripoint of the villages of Korman, Maršić and Gornje Komarice. Not a few people are concluding, with undisguised irony, that the people of Kragujevac will have to wait for robots manufactured in the complex comprising the State Data Centre and the Innovation District to build them a modern landfill.
(Radar, 22.09.2026)
https://radar.nova.rs/ekonomija/drzavni-data-centar-u-kragujevcu-ai/