Cunningham has secured €35m of new data centre contracts in Dublin and Skellefteå, Sweden, a pair of awards that extends a Newry contractor’s data centre work from Irish battery storage into hyperscale civil packages in Sweden.

Cunningham, a Newry-based contractor founded in 2006, delivers construction projects across Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe, with a Mission Critical Division for complex data centre infrastructure and growing operations in Germany and Sweden.

The Dublin contract is an eight-month battery energy storage system project at an existing hyperscale campus in Blanchardstown, covering transformers and connections to existing network infrastructure, while the Swedish award is a 12-month civil, structural and architectural package on a large hyperscale development in Skellefteå.

John Cunningham, who brings more than 30 years of senior construction leadership, will oversee the division’s operational and commercial capabilities, team development and client relationships as it pursues opportunities across Europe.

Chief Executive Tim Cunningham said the contracts, European expansion and stronger senior team are significant milestones, and that John Cunningham’s experience will be instrumental as the division develops its capabilities and pursues new opportunities across Ireland and Europe.

The two contracts total €35m; individual contract values and client names were not disclosed.

The Dublin package reflects a regulatory shift: Ireland’s energy regulator ended an effective moratorium on new Dublin-region data centre grid connections in December 2025, requiring dispatchable generation matched to import capacity and 80% renewable energy matching over a six-year glide path, which puts on-site power resilience works such as battery systems on project agendas.

Sweden’s pipeline shows the scale of what is coming: DC Market Insights tracks 157MW of operational capacity in Sweden, 250MW under construction and 1,248MW planned, a ratio that favours contractors with civil and structural capability, since most of the pipeline is still to be built.

Skellefteå is attracting gigawatt-scale proposals, although Cunningham’s client was not named.

For the sector, contractors that can offer both power infrastructure and hyperscale civil packages across Ireland and the Nordics are positioned to follow clients as power constraints and new connection rules shape where data centre capacity is built.

Source: Belfast News Letter / RE24 Energy / DC Market Insights / Datacenter Dynamics