Market · Digital infrastructure
In Amsterdam the first question is admissibility.
On 11 June 2025 the city stopped regulating how a data center is built and started deciding whether it may be built. For the general counsel of an operator, a developer or the fund behind one, that moves the first legal question upstream of every commercial term on the table.
Two rules, and each one turns on an 'and'.
Two instruments decide whether a Dutch campus may exist at all, and each is written with a conjunction in the middle. Amsterdam forbids a data center above 2,000 m2 that also draws more than 5 MVA. The national rule catches one above 10 hectares that also takes 70 MW or more. The first pair of limits is low enough that almost every real project trips it; the second is high enough that a 99 MW campus on 2.2 hectares does not. Sartori maps about 3,000 lawyers across this market, and the capability that reads both conjunctions against one site is the scarce one.
On 11 June 2025 the gemeenteraad adopted an umbrella plan whose rules forbid a new or expanded data center above 2,000 m² of floor area and above 5 MVA of connection capacity, across the entire municipality. The plan does not contain the use.
Each reading is developed below. If you are weighing whether to hold data center planning counsel Netherlands as a standing seat or keep instructing it out, start with where the seat sits today.
- 11 Jun 2025
- Council adopts the city-wide use prohibitionCity executive had decided on 15 April 2025
- Gemeente Amsterdam, bestemmingsplan Datacenters
- 28 Dec 2023
- Deposit date that fixes which files stay outside itFour objections were filed on the draft
- Gemeenteblad 2023 nr. 565649, 27 December 2023
- €125m
- Grid reinforcement the city no longer has to buildThree planned Amsterdam substations dropped
- Liander, 21 November 2025
- 4.6%
- Share of Dutch electricity delivered to data centers in 20245,100 GWh, up 37 percent on 2021
- CBS, 15 December 2025
Refusal is the default, and the default is not a scheduling problem.
Most legal budgets on a data center assume the project is permissible and argue about terms and timing. Amsterdam inverts that order, and the inversion is what a corporate legal department keeps discovering late.
A planning refusal and a planning prohibition feel similar from a boardroom and behave nothing alike. A refusal is a decision about an application, and it can be appealed, renegotiated or resubmitted against a better case. A prohibition is a statement that the plan does not contain the use at all, so there is nothing for an application to succeed against. Since 11 June 2025 Amsterdam has been in the second condition. The umbrella plan adopted that day layers a use prohibition over the temporary part of the city’s planning rules, covering the whole municipality including Weesp, and it bites on any new or expanded data center that exceeds 2,000 m² of gross floor area and 5 MVA of connection capacity together.
What the city withdrew at the same time matters as much as what it added. The 2020 siting policy had set out a growth path, clustering data centers in designated business parks and leaving room for connection growth up to 670 MVA by 2030. The first revision adopted alongside the plan deleted that envelope. In its explanatory memorandum the city set out its own arithmetic for why: reaching the old ceiling would have required three additional electricity substations, each carrying a reservation of about 7,000 m² plus cable routes and noise contours, and about 21,000 m² in total on land the city wants for housing. The network operator confirmed the consequence on 21 November 2025: with no new large data centers admitted since 11 June 2025, three planned Amsterdam substations come out of the plan, avoiding roughly €125 million of reinforcement.
For a legal department the practical effect is a reordering of spend. The ordinary sequence runs land, power, construction, operation, with the planning question treated as a timetable inside the second and third steps. Here the planning question is a gate in front of the first. It is also cheap to answer relative to everything behind it, which is what makes answering it late so expensive: a general counsel who commissions an admissibility opinion in month one is buying a few weeks of an administrative lawyer’s time, and a general counsel who commissions it in month nine is buying the same opinion after the site, the offtake and the board approval have all been priced on an assumption nobody tested.
Permit as a timetableUse as a question
- Scope the site Land, power and offtake are negotiated first. The legal department is asked to paper a transaction whose central premise — that the project is capable of existing here — nobody has been asked to test.
- Read the plan late Someone finally opens the rules. The project is not slow; it is outside what the plan permits, and the only route left carries tests written by four different authorities.
- Answer admissibility first An administrative lawyer reads the plan, the siting policy, the provincial rules and the national rule against this site, and says whether an exception is arguable, before capital is committed against the answer.
A refusal is a decision you can argue with. A prohibition is a use the plan does not contain, and the answer to it is written in administrative law rather than in the deal.
One site, measured by four authorities on different limits.
The thresholds in this market do not stack neatly. They sit at different levels of government, they trigger on different quantities, and two of the four require both of their limits to be crossed before they apply at all.
The two conjunctions run in opposite directions for a buyer, which is why reading one instrument in isolation produces confident errors in both directions. The municipal pair — 2,000 m² and 5 MVA — is set low enough that essentially any commercially serious project clears it, so the prohibition is close to universal in practice. The national pair — more than 10 hectares of built floor area and 70 MW or more of connection capacity, in force since 1 January 2024 under Staatsblad 2023, 492 — is set high enough that very little clears it, and both limbs must be met. A legal department briefed only on the national rule concludes its project is unregulated. A legal department briefed only on the headlines concludes nothing can be built. Both are wrong, and the distance between them is a reading of two words.
The parliamentary record makes the point concrete. Answering questions on 2 April 2026 about the largest campus under construction in the city, the minister recorded a built floor area of 2.2 hectares and a connection of 33 MW per tower for 99 MW across three towers, and stated that the national instruction rule does not apply because the floor-area limb is not met. The same answer records that permitting the towers separately makes no difference to that test, because together they still sit under ten hectares. Ninety-nine megawatts of load is therefore not, as a matter of Dutch law, a hyperscale. Whether it may exist was decided by the city, on a different instrument, on different numbers.
There is a fourth reading that catches legal departments who do their homework at the wrong altitude. Amsterdam’s entire territory sits inside the provincial area where the Noord-Holland instruction rules permit data-center clustering. Read the province and the project looks admissible in principle. The city runs a stricter regime than the instruction above it, and the stricter one is the one an application is decided against.
| Instrument | Triggers on | Issuer and date | What the legal department has to hold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Municipal umbrella plan | Above 2,000 m2 floor area AND above 5 MVA connection | Gemeenteraad Amsterdam, 11 June 2025 | A reading of whether the use is forbidden, before any commercial term |
| Revised municipal siting policy | Same two limits, applied as the exception test | Gemeenteraad Amsterdam, 11 June 2025 | The exception application and the balance-of-functions case behind it |
| Provincial instruction rules | Above 2,000 m2 and above 5 MVA, inside the clustering area | Provincie Noord-Holland, in force 1 January 2024 | A provincial reading that does not decide the municipal one |
| National hyperscale rule | Above 10 hectares AND 70 MW or more | Staatsblad 2023, 492, in force 1 January 2024 | A measurement of built floor area, not only of megawatts |
| Environmental permit | From 15 MW of installed motor capacity | Provincial authority via the environmental service | Noise, air, generators and water, on a separate clock |
| EU reporting duty | 500 kW or more of installed IT power | Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364, 14 March 2024 | An annual filing that binds sites already operating |
The number the argument keeps missing
The city’s own explanatory memorandum contains a figure that neither side of the public argument quotes. Amsterdam held about 600 MVA of data-center connection capacity in 2019. The 2020 policy would have allowed growth to 670 MVA by 2030, and that ceiling was withdrawn in June 2025. But the projects that stay outside the prohibition because they predate the deposit date are, on the city’s own estimate, enough to take the total to about 950 MVA by 2030. The prohibition removes the growth path and still leaves the city ending the decade well above the ceiling it cancelled. For a general counsel that is not a rhetorical point. It is the reason a prohibition and a moratorium are different products, and the reason diligence on a Dutch asset now starts with a date rather than with a site.
Three desks, and only one of them wrote the rule.
An admissibility question in this city is answered by a chain of public bodies that do not share a building, a clock or a standard of review. Knowing which one is deciding is most of the skill.
The council writes the plan and the siting policy, and in doing so decides whether the use exists at all. The city executive, acting in practice through a regional environmental service, grants or refuses the permit — and that same service issues environmental permits for the province as well as the city, so a single campus can receive its building consent and its environmental consent from one office acting under two different mandates. The administrative courts hear the objection and the appeal. Because the draft plan went on deposit before 1 January 2024, appeals against the plan itself run under the planning statute that preceded the new environmental code, while a fresh exception application runs under the new one. The Amsterdam market is currently litigating both regimes at once.
The city drafted the prohibition expecting to defend it. Its explanatory memorandum contains a written justification against the EU rules on freedom of establishment, arguing the restriction on non-discrimination, necessity and proportionality grounds: that business parks must retain space for other uses, that scarce land should not be consumed by substations and their contours, and that the electricity network should not be overloaded. Whatever a reader thinks of that reasoning, its presence tells a general counsel something practical. This is an instrument built to survive a challenge, which means a challenge is the expected route and the capability to run one is the capability to buy.
None of that reaches the second gate. Even a project that is admissible has to obtain the power, and the power is allocated by a different body on different principles. The regulator’s framework for prioritizing transport requests does not list data centers as a priority class; the specialist administrative court annulled the 2024 version of that framework on 11 March 2025 for inadequate preparation and reasoning while leaving it in force, and the replacement decision of 12 December 2025 still contains no data-center priority. On 29 April 2026 a court dismissed a developer’s urgent claim to be connected, on the ground that without a signed connection and transport agreement there was no contracted right to enforce. Admissibility and deliverability are separate questions with separate refusals.
Writes the ruleDecides your file
- The council Adopts the plan and the siting policy, and in doing so settles whether the use exists in the city at all. It is not deciding your project; it is deciding the category your project belongs to.
- The permitting office Grants or refuses, acting for the city on planning and for the province on environmental matters. One counterparty, two mandates, two standards, and correspondence that has to be read for which hat it is wearing.
- The administrative court Hears the objection and the appeal. The plan was drafted to survive this route, which makes running it the capability a company has to hold rather than an escalation it hopes to avoid.
The province permits what the city forbids. Reading the level above the one that decides is the most expensive mistake available in this market, and it is the easiest one to make from abroad.
The desks that hold planning law in-house all sit on the deciding side.
Read the requisitions rather than the practice pages. Across the Amsterdam postings and public filings opened for this article in 2026, the seats that own an admissibility question with their own lawyers belong to the bodies that decide it. The companies whose projects are being decided buy that reading by the hour.
The city advertises a planning-law jurist in its spatial planning department whose written duties are assessing permit applications that deviate from the planning rules, advising on spatial initiatives, contributing to changes in those rules and sitting on the integrated advisory table. That is a precise description of the work the June 2025 prohibition created, and it sits inside the authority that created it. The regional network operator’s engineering arm advertises a legal environment manager in Amsterdam Westpoort covering planning and environmental law, obtaining permits, coordinating changes to municipal planning rules and running objection and appeal proceedings, with a requirement of at least five years in the field. That seat exists because the operator’s own substations and cable routes need the same permissions the prohibition just made scarcer.
Now read the other side of the meter. A global colocation operator’s regional legal requisition, posted 7 March 2026, covers land acquisition and campus development, construction, real-estate portfolio management and energy matters such as grid connection, and lists instructing and managing external counsel as one of its duties. It is a real and demanding seat, and it is not an admissibility seat. No Amsterdam in-house legal requisition naming the municipal plan, the exception route or the balance-of-functions test was found at any operator, developer, offtaker or fund in the public record reviewed here. Their Dutch planning work is instructed to firms, and the firm-side hire that matches it is visible: an Amsterdam practice advertised a regulatory associate on 26 May 2026 combining energy regulation with planning and environmental law, litigation and advice, explicitly including the allocation of scarce transport capacity.
The asymmetry is the finding, and it is sharper here than the same shape elsewhere. Every desk that holds this capability with its own lawyers — the city, the permitting office, the network operator — sits on the side that grants or refuses. Not one of the seven buyer types below that has a project to get through the prohibition employs a lawyer whose job description names it. That is defensible while the answer is yes. It stops being defensible the moment the answer is a prohibition, because the first decision to be made — whether to file at all, and on what theory — is precisely the decision an external adviser is not permitted to make for you.
| Buyer | Where the seat sits today | Practice label on the requisition | Who carries the position |
|---|---|---|---|
| City authority | In-house, spatial planning department | Planning-law jurist, deviations from the planning rules | Its own; it drafted the prohibition |
| Environmental service | In-house public, acting for city and province | Environmental permitting, noise, water, integrity screening | Its own, as the permitting authority |
| Network operator | In-house, Amsterdam Westpoort | Planning and environmental law for substations and cable routes | In-house, with firms behind it on appeal |
| Colocation operator | Standing regional in-house seat; Dutch reading instructed out | Real estate, construction and grid connection | Outside counsel, on instruction |
| Developer | No in-house seat found in the public record | Planning law, environmental appeal, integrity screening | Outside counsel |
| Hyperscale offtaker | No Amsterdam legal requisition found | Local planning and energy counsel, instructed | Outside counsel |
| Infrastructure fund | National and international finance counsel | Project finance and joint venture; entitlements as local counsel | Outside counsel |
What two legal leaders told us about the same discovery
A general counsel at a European colocation operator described the moment the file changed character. Her department had been treating a Dutch site as a permitting timetable with a difficult counterparty, and had staffed it accordingly, with a construction lawyer and an external firm on call. What arrived instead was the finding that the use was not permitted at all, and the question the board then asked — is this arguable — was one nobody in the department had been hired to answer. The instruction went out, the advice was good, and the eleven weeks it took to reach a position were eleven weeks of an already-committed construction schedule. Separately, a head of legal at an infrastructure fund put the diligence problem in a single sentence: on a Dutch data-center asset the date on the original application is now worth more than the quality of the site, and it is the first thing to establish and the last thing anyone checks.
Sartori’s Amsterdam interview cohort of 250 structured interviews contains 88 lawyers holding in-house planning, environmental or infrastructure seats at operators, developers, network businesses and their investors. Over the 24 months to June 2026, 59 of those 88 reported that their department had scoped a Dutch site on commercial and grid terms before anyone had established whether the use was admissible. That is not a comment on the quality of those departments. It is what happens when an instrument changes category and the job descriptions do not.
The largest campus in the city is being built inside the prohibition.
A city-wide ban that leaves the biggest project untouched is not a contradiction. It is the acquired-rights doctrine doing exactly what it is for, and it is the single most valuable thing a legal department can understand about this market.
Three categories of project sit outside the June 2025 prohibition. Data centers lawfully in existence when the draft went on deposit keep operating, and efficiency work inside the same plot remains possible. Sites that stay under either of the two limits are never caught. And projects that had filed an application, or were in documented pre-application talks, before 28 December 2023 can still be permitted if they also meet the revised policy and the balance-of-functions test. Six Amsterdam plans were in that condition when the stop was decided.
The consequences are visible on the ground. The Westpoort campus applied for its building consent on 3 December 2019 and received it on 6 November 2020; its three environmental permits and a noise-plan deviation were granted on 15 July 2025, more than a month after the prohibition was adopted, on an application lodged in April 2022 — and were still under appeal when the minister answered parliament on 2 April 2026. A second campus in the south-east received a published permit in July 2026 for the first of four towers, with the remaining three held until 2036 because a dedicated high-voltage connection is not available before then. The city has said publicly that it cannot tear up permits of this vintage without paying compensation, and its assessment of that exposure is sealed for five years.
None of this is a loophole, and describing it as one leads legal departments to the wrong hire. It is the ordinary operation of legal certainty, and it converts a planning question into an evidentiary one. The work is proving chronology: which document was filed, on what date, against which version of the rules, whether pre-application contact was documented at the time or reconstructed afterwards, and whether the consent granted on it has become unchallengeable. That is archival, adversarial, administrative work. It is not what a commercial real-estate or energy lawyer is trained to do, and it is worth more per hour on a Dutch asset today than anything downstream of it.
On a Dutch asset the date on the original application is now worth more than the quality of the site. It is the first thing to establish and the last thing anyone checks.
A small bench, and the strongest part of it has never worked for a company.
The capability this market needs is Dutch administrative law applied to a specific instrument. That is not a scarce skill in the abstract. It is scarce inside corporate legal departments, and the places it is concentrated are places a company search does not usually look.
Three pools produce candidates for this seat and they are not interchangeable. The first is commercial energy and infrastructure counsel, fluent in connection agreements, offtake and construction, and generally unpracticed at arguing an exception against a municipality. The second is the firm-side planning and environmental bar, which is genuinely strong here and carries objections and appeals for whoever instructs it; the Amsterdam regulatory associate posting of 26 May 2026 that combines energy regulation with planning law, at three to eight years of experience, is what that pool looks like when it advertises. The third is the public side: jurists who have sat where a deviation from the planning rules is granted or refused, in a municipality or an environmental service.
The third pool is the one companies systematically fail to consider, and on this instrument it is the strongest. Someone who has assessed applications that deviate from the planning rules knows what an exception has to say before it is written, which parts of a justification the deciding office finds thin, and how the balance-of-functions test is actually applied rather than how it reads. That is exactly the knowledge a company needs at the point where it is deciding whether to file at all. The obstacle is not availability. It is that the move is a large one in both directions — from a public salary scale to a corporate one, and from deciding to advocating — and that a requisition written by a development function rarely describes the work in terms that person recognizes.
Pay is the part of this market where the public record is thinnest, and the gap cuts against the easy story. The two bands below are published monthly gross scales from postings we opened; both are public-sector or network-operator seats. No operator, developer, fund or firm published a band on any Amsterdam posting reviewed for this article. A general counsel building a business case here cannot benchmark the private-side seat from public data, which is itself a finding: the pay conversation in this market happens entirely in private, and a company that opens with a number derived from the published scales will be anchoring on the wrong side of the move it is asking someone to make.
City planning-law jurist, top of scale
Assesses applications that deviate from the planning rules and contributes to drafting them. The seat that holds the prohibition from the deciding side. Posting closed.
Municipal posting, advertised scaleKnows the sectorCan carry the file
- Commercial counsel Reads a connection agreement and a construction contract without effort. Fluent in the deal, and structurally downstream of the question that decides whether there is one.
- The planning bar Carries objections and appeals for whoever instructs it, and does it well. Excellent, available by the hour, and permanently on the outside of the decision a company has to make for itself.
- The public-side jurist Has sat where a deviation is granted or refused. Knows what an exception has to say before it is written, and is the pool a corporate search almost never opens.
What our own telemetry says about filling it
We have worked the Amsterdam in-house market for five years, for operators, developers, network businesses and the funds behind them. Sartori’s Amsterdam mandate telemetry covers 15 closed in-house searches over the trailing three years, 93 percent of them completed, at a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months, a counter-offer incidence of 27 percent and a median of 13 working days between offer and signature. Within that set, 6 were briefs whose first named responsibility was an administrative one rather than a commercial one, and those six behaved differently from the rest of the book.
They also produced the number we like least. 3 of those 6 ran past the seven-month top of our own stated band, and 2 of the 15 closed Amsterdam searches were filled by candidates our mapping had not surfaced — jurists working inside a municipality or an environmental service rather than in the advocacy or in a company. Our coverage of this city is built on the practicing bar, and the bench for this particular instrument is not only made of advocaten. We can say that the public-side pool is the strongest one for this work and simultaneously that our own instrument sees it worst, and a general counsel weighing our advice should hold both of those at once.
The seat is often filled rather than advertised. A planning jurist moves across from the office that used to decide the company’s applications, and nothing about it ever reaches the market.
Decide what the seat is allowed to conclude before you write the advertisement.
The requisition is the deliverable in this market, more than the shortlist is. A brief that describes energy or construction work and then expects an administrative file to be carried produces two candidate pools and fills neither.
The structural question is not seniority or budget. It is authority: whether the person you hire is permitted to conclude, in writing and against a committed schedule, that a site the company already owns cannot lawfully hold what the company intends to put on it. A seat that can reach that conclusion and be heard is worth the search. A seat that reports into the function whose plan the conclusion would break is a hire that will be made once and lost twice. Candidates read the reporting line for exactly this and interpret it correctly within a single conversation.
| What to test | The question that gets a real answer | When it decides the hire |
|---|---|---|
| Admissibility first | Has the candidate ever written the opinion that a use is forbidden, and been believed by a board that had already committed to the site? | Every level |
| Chronology work | Can they reconstruct which document was filed on which date against which version of the rules, and say what that buys the company today? | Any project with a pre-2024 file |
| Deciding-side experience | Have they sat where the deviation is granted or refused, rather than only where it is argued from the outside? | The exception route |
| Two authorities at once | Have they run a municipal planning position and a provincial environmental position that had to stay consistent with each other? | Sites above the environmental threshold |
| Panel direction | Have they set the budget and the division of labor with an external firm on a live administrative file, rather than on a transaction? | First internal hire |
| Reporting line | Will the seat report to the general counsel, or into a development function that will treat a prohibition as a scheduling problem? | Structural, decided before the search |
Write the authority into the brief, not the subject matter. Everyone can list the instruments; almost nobody states who is allowed to say no.
- Settle the reporting line first. Into the general counsel, or into a development function that will hear a prohibition as a scheduling complaint. This is visible to candidates immediately and it is not recoverable later.
- Open the public-side pool deliberately. The strongest candidates for this instrument have sat where deviations are decided, and they will not answer an advertisement written in commercial language.
- Separate this from the adjacent hires. Construction, procurement and energy contracting are real seats staffed elsewhere. One requisition covering all of them produces two shortlists and no offer.
- Price the move, not the scale. The published Dutch bands here are public-sector ones, and a company anchoring on them is quoting the salary the candidate is leaving.
- Budget four to seven months, and start the clock when the brief is settled rather than when the requisition opens.
The question is not what the work is. It is whether your conclusion binds anyone, and you can find that out before you accept.
- Ask who signs the position. If a prohibition has to be escalated through a committee that meets monthly, the schedule will beat the governance and you will own the gap.
- Ask what happened last time. A company that has argued an exception has a record and a habit. A company reading the plan for the first time is an opportunity and a warning in the same file.
- Carry one file end to end. Application through objection and appeal, as the named internal holder. That is the credential this market prices, and volume of advice does not substitute for it.
- Test the panel relationship. A seat that directs excellent external counsel is a stronger platform than one expected to replace them, and job descriptions describe the two identically.
- Explore quietly. A confidential conversation costs nothing and commits nothing. See our guide on making the move in-house.
- Q1 Can anyone in the company name which instrument decides your site? If the answer is the national rule → the first hire is someone who reads the municipal plan, because the national rule probably does not reach you.
- Q2 Do you know the date on your earliest filed document, and can you prove it? If not → that evidence work comes before any hire, and it may change what you are hiring for.
- Q3 Is one named person allowed to conclude that the project is not admissible? If the conclusion has to survive the function that owns the schedule → fix the reporting line before opening the search.
- → All three clear? Open a targeted, confidential search — and keep the panel, because this seat directs it rather than replacing it.
Common questions about hiring planning counsel for a Dutch data center
Does Amsterdam's June 2025 decision ban all new data centers?
No — it forbids only new or expanded data centers above 2,000 m² and above 5 MVA, both limits together, city-wide since 11 June 2025. Those limits are gross floor area and electrical connection capacity. The umbrella plan adopted by the gemeenteraad that day adds the prohibition on top of the temporary part of the city’s planning rules, Weesp included (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2025). A site that stays under either limit is untouched. A lawfully existing data center keeps operating, and efficiency work inside the same plot remains possible. What ended is the growth path: the 2020 siting policy had left room for connection growth to 670 MVA by 2030, and the first revision adopted alongside the plan withdrew that envelope and replaced it with a refusal that a project has to argue its way out of.
What does data center planning counsel Netherlands actually do that an energy lawyer does not?
It answers admissibility: whether the use may exist at all, read against four instruments — the municipal plan, the revised siting policy, the provincial instruction rules and the national rule. The seat applies all four to one site and says whether the project is capable of being permitted before a commercial term is agreed. An energy lawyer prices and papers a connection; that work begins after the answer, and in this city it can be wasted by it. The Amsterdam requisitions that name this capability describe deviations from the planning rules, the balance-of-functions test, objections and appeals. The requisitions that name grid connection sit in a different job description, usually at a regional level, and expressly include instructing local counsel rather than replacing them.
Our project was permitted before the prohibition. Are we outside it?
Probably, if the application or documented pre-application talks predate 28 December 2023, when the draft plan went on deposit (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2023). Six Amsterdam plans were already running when the stop was decided, and the city has said publicly that it cannot unwind them without paying compensation. That is a legal position rather than a goodwill gesture, and it is the reason the largest campus in the city is still being built inside a prohibition. The work it creates is not transactional. It is proving chronology: which document was filed, on what date, against which version of the rules, and whether the permit granted on it is yet beyond challenge.
Is a 99 MW campus a hyperscale under the national rule?
Only if the built floor area also exceeds 10 hectares. The national instruction rule in force since 1 January 2024 defines a hyperscale as more than 10 hectares of built floor area and a connection of 70 MW or more, and both limbs must be met (Staatsblad 2023, 492). Answering a parliamentary question on 2 April 2026, the minister recorded that the Westpoort campus covers 2.2 hectares and draws 33 MW per tower for 99 MW in total, and that the national rule therefore does not apply to it. A legal department that has read only the national rule will conclude its project is unregulated. The instrument that actually decides the site is the municipal one.
Which parts of this work does a company hold in-house, and which does it buy?
Of the seven buyer types reviewed for this article, three answer admissibility with their own lawyers and four instruct it out. The three are the city, the environmental service that issues permits for both the city and the province, and the network operator whose own substations need the same permissions. Every one of them sits on the deciding side. The operators, developers, offtakers and funds whose projects are being decided carry a commercial or infrastructure seat and buy the planning reading by the hour. That is a defensible arrangement while the answer is yes. It becomes expensive when the answer is a prohibition, because the decision that has to be made first — whether to file at all — is the one an external adviser cannot make.
How long does the seat take to fill, and what goes wrong?
Budget 4 to 7 months. Across 15 closed Amsterdam in-house searches over the trailing three years, Sartori’s mandate telemetry records 93 percent completion, a 27 percent counter-offer incidence and a median of 13 working days between offer and signature. The failure mode is not shortlist quality. It is a requisition that describes energy or construction work, then expects the hire to carry an administrative file against the municipality — two different candidate pools, trained differently and found in different places. The searches that ran long were the ones where nobody had decided, before the search opened, whether the seat was there to argue the exception or to price the deal that follows it.
The plan rules, the ministerial answer, the network operator's filings and the published pay scales.
Thresholds, dates and the exception route come from the adopted plan, its explanatory memorandum and the council paper behind it. Project facts come from the minister's answer to parliament. Network figures come from the operator's own publications and the national statistics office. Pay figures are advertised scales on individual postings.
Sources & further reading
31 references- Sartori & Partners — Amsterdam Legal Talent Research Programme (250 structured interviews; ~3,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- Gemeente Amsterdam — Bestemmingsplan Datacenters, adopted by the gemeenteraad 11 June 2025 openresearch.amsterdam ↗
- Gemeente Amsterdam — Bestemmingsplan Datacenters, plan rules and explanatory memorandum (print 24 March 2025) openresearch.amsterdam ↗
- Gemeente Amsterdam — Council paper for the sitting of 11 June 2025 (legal basis, review line, first revision of the siting policy) amsterdam.raadsinformatie.nl ↗
- Gemeenteblad 2023 nr. 565649 — draft umbrella plan on deposit from 28 December 2023 (27 December 2023) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- Gemeenteblad 2023 nr. 486616 — city-wide preparatory freeze, gemeenteraad 9 November 2023 (15 November 2023) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- Staatscourant 2019 nr. 42491 — first Amsterdam freeze, gemeenteraad 12 July 2019 (31 July 2019) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- Staatsblad 2023, 492 — national instruction rule on hyperscale data centers, in force 1 January 2024 (20 December 2023) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- Staatscourant 2022 nr. 5276 — national preparatory decision on hyperscale data centers (16 February 2022) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- Provincie Noord-Holland — Datacenterstrategie 2025-2027, adopted by Provinciale Staten 3 February 2025 noord-holland.nl ↗
- Provincie Noord-Holland — Guideline on sustainable establishment conditions for data centers (English translation) noord-holland.nl ↗
- Minister of Housing and Spatial Planning — answers to parliamentary questions 2026D15709 on the Westpoort campus (2 April 2026) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- Liander — Less grid reinforcement needed because of the strict data-center policy (21 November 2025) liander.nl ↗
- Liander — More than 130 Amsterdam customers taken off the connection wait list (6 November 2025) liander.nl ↗
- Liander — Social prioritization of transport requests, restating the ACM decision of 12 December 2025 liander.nl ↗
- Liander — Development framework for the Amsterdam electricity supply to 2035 liander.nl ↗
- Staatscourant 2024 nr. 12928 — ACM code decision on prioritization of transport requests (18 April 2024) zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl ↗
- ACM — Response to the CBb ruling of 11 March 2025 on the prioritization framework acm.nl ↗
- NOS — Grid operator not required to connect a data center immediately, Rechtbank Gelderland 29 April 2026 (ECLI:NL:RBGEL:2026:3358) nos.nl ↗
- CBS — Data centers consumed 4.6 percent of the Netherlands' electricity in 2024 (15 December 2025) cbs.nl ↗
- TenneT — Congestion study Noord-Holland, offtake (December 2024) tennet-drupal.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com ↗
- AT5 — City executive announces no new data centers and no expansion of existing ones (17 April 2025) at5.nl ↗
- DutchNews — Campaigners call on Amsterdam to pull the plug on a permitted campus (18 August 2026) dutchnews.nl ↗
- Binnenlands Bestuur — New data centers despite the prohibition (4 March 2026) binnenlandsbestuur.nl ↗
- Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364 — reporting scheme for data centers from 500 kW of installed IT power (14 March 2024) eur-lex.europa.eu ↗
- CMS Netherlands — Expert guide to data center consenting in the Netherlands (24 January 2024) cms.law ↗
- 8baan — Planning-law jurist, capital-city municipality, spatial planning department (advertised monthly scale; posting closed) 8baan.nl ↗
- Magnet.me — Legal environment manager, network-operator engineering subsidiary, Amsterdam (advertised monthly scale, posted 6 May 2026) magnet.me ↗
- Magnet.me — Regulatory associate, energy and planning law, Amsterdam firm (posted 26 May 2026) magnet.me ↗
- The Muse — Legal counsel, real estate and infrastructure, global colocation operator (posted 7 March 2026) themuse.com ↗
- Sartori & Partners — In-house counsel recruiting ↗
The floor-area and connection limits are published thresholds inside the instruments, not counts of sites that meet them. MVA figures are connection-capacity envelopes from the city's explanatory memorandum; MW figures in the same section are modelled peak load for the whole city network across all uses. The Westpoort figures are the built floor area and connection capacity recorded in the minister's answer of 2 April 2026, when the environmental permits were still under appeal. The national electricity share measures metered supply to connections whose main activity is a data center, not installed IT capacity. Compensation figures are advertised monthly gross scales on individual public-sector and network-operator postings, not salaries paid and not survey data.
Our own figures — the interview cohort, the mandate telemetry, the counter-offer incidence and the offer-to-acceptance window — come from the continuous research program described on our research page, which sets out the cohorts, the survey waves and the mapping coverage behind every Sartori number quoted above.
Adjacent maps for the same buyer.
This seat sits between the European energy legal market and the structural work of building a corporate legal department. These pieces extend the map without repeating the argument above.
Hiring Your First General Counsel
What decides whether a first senior legal hire works: the scope of the seat, the reporting line, budget authority and the file it will actually own.
Read the hiring guideIs Energy Transition Law Hiring in 2026?
The wider European energy legal market this seat recruits out of, and how regulatory demand is moving against transactional demand.
Read the energy readIn-House Counsel Recruiting
How we build corporate legal departments: scoping the seat before the search, mapping quietly, and saying when a requisition is not ready to open.
See how we workA quiet conversation
Deciding whether to build the seat or keep instructing outward?
We build corporate legal departments in Amsterdam, and we are as willing to tell a company that a requisition is not ready as to open a search. Confidential, no obligation.