Who maps our digital real estate capacity?

In recent years, the Netherlands has become increasingly skilled at mapping grid congestion. Grid operators publish capacity maps that show, down to street level, where the electricity grid is at capacity. There is power, but the grid locally lacks sufficient transport capacity to accommodate supply and demand. That transparency helps entrepreneurs, developers and public authorities make informed decisions about where to build and expand.

Digital infrastructure has no comparable map. We know exactly how many square meters of office space the Netherlands has, what a building is worth, what energy label it carries and where it is located. What is much harder to find out is a seemingly simple question: what can this specific building actually handle digitally?

This article examines that question by looking at what official bodies already measure and prescribe. It is deliberately not an alarmist story. It is an attempt to first lay out the facts, and only then ask whether the Netherlands, alongside energy capacity, should also gain better insight into the digital capacity of its building stock.

Start with the Rijksvastgoedbedrijf

A good place to start is the Rijksvastgoedbedrijf (RVB), the organization that manages the Dutch central government's real estate. For the digital fit-out of government offices, the RVB applies its ICT Housing and Cabling Handbook, known as the HIB. The current version sets out requirements and principles for ICT rooms, cabling infrastructure, redundancy, scalability, Power over Ethernet, smart building technology, data-driven building management and cybersecurity, among other things.

What stands out is the principle that future-proof ICT infrastructure must be robust, secure, flexible, scalable and sustainable. That may sound like a technical formulation, but its implication is fundamental: the RVB is effectively acknowledging that digital infrastructure is part of an office's future functionality. A building that must support hybrid working and growing data traffic is not complete once only the meters and the energy label are in order. This same principle recurs in broader thinking about future-proof construction.

The RVB itself is also increasingly using AI and data-driven technology, for example to analyze real estate data and geographic information. That raises a logical follow-up question. If the government is deploying more data, sensors, digital building systems and smart building technology internally, this will over time place demands on the digital capacity of the buildings in which those organizations work. The more digitally an organization operates, the less optional the digital quality of its premises becomes.

Internal infrastructure and external connectivity are two different things

It is important here to distinguish between two things that are often lumped together. The first is a building's internal ICT infrastructure: the cabling, the technical rooms, the distribution to workstations and the building-related systems. The second is external connectivity: the building's connection to telecom and data networks, including whether multiple independent routes are available. A building can have excellent internal cabling and still depend on a single vulnerable external connection, or the other way around. Anyone assessing the digital quality of a property needs to understand both layers. The importance of multiple routes is discussed further in network redundancy.

The core point is that a detailed, government-wide standard exists for government offices. That raises the question underlying the rest of this article: how is this arranged and made visible within commercial real estate, where no central client imposes such principles?

What does CBS actually know?

For national figures, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) is the go-to source. CBS publishes a great deal on the digitalization of Dutch companies. This includes figures on fixed and mobile internet connections, broadband, cloud use, ICT use by businesses, working from home and telework, and increasingly AI use as well. This produces a fairly clear picture of how digitally the Dutch business sector operates.

CBS also publishes extensively on commercial real estate, including price developments for offices, retail and industrial buildings. A great deal is also known about the building stock itself: floor area, year of construction, use function and location are well documented. On both topics individually, then, the Netherlands is data-rich.

The critical question is whether these two worlds, digitalization on one hand and real estate on the other, are also linked to each other. Does any public body publish, nationally and at building level, how many commercial properties are actually connected to fiber, what business internet capacity is available per building, whether multiple independent providers are present, what redundancy a property has and what internal cabling exists? Based on publicly available sources, such linked information at building level is not easily found.

We know the year of construction of nearly every office building in the Netherlands. But whether that office can support its tenants' digital growth over the next ten years is recorded nowhere.

It is important to phrase this carefully. It is not that the Netherlands measures nothing. There is, in fact, a great deal of data. What appears to be missing is the link at building level between digital usage and digital building capacity. A second distinction plays a role here as well. "Fiber runs through the street or the area" is a different statement from "this specific building has a future-proof digital infrastructure that lets users actually grow." Coverage in an area says little about the connection, the internal distribution and the scalability of a specific property. More on this can be found in our overview of fiber in buildings.

From grid congestion to data congestion?

The analogy with the electricity grid is hard to avoid. With grid congestion, power is available, but local transport capacity is lacking. Could something similar become an increasingly relevant location issue in the digital domain?

Some restraint with terminology is warranted here. Data congestion is not, as far as we can determine, a commonly used, officially recognized technical or policy term. We therefore present it explicitly as a concept and a question posed by IT-Label, not as an already established, proven problem. We define it as follows: a situation in which an organization's digital ambitions and data usage grow faster than the available connectivity and digital infrastructure of its location or building can accommodate.

It is also important that internet networks function differently, technically, from the electricity grid. Data can be routed, buffered and scaled more easily than electrons on a physical transport network. Grid congestion and digital capacity issues are therefore not directly comparable, and it would be incorrect to suggest that national-level data congestion already exists. There is no evidence for that.

The strategic question nonetheless remains. What happens when companies invest heavily in AI and data-driven working, while some of the buildings in which they are located cannot keep pace digitally? This is not an announcement of a crisis, but an exploration of where future bottlenecks in capacity, redundancy and connectivity might arise. We previously wrote about whether the broader internet could face such bottlenecks in will we face digital congestion too?.

AI is changing the housing question

Anyone searching for office space today traditionally looks at a fixed checklist: square meters, rent, accessibility, parking, energy label and amenities. Shouldn't a new category be added to that list? Digital capacity.

A company signing a five or ten year lease naturally investigates how many employees will fit. The question that is becoming increasingly relevant alongside that is whether the location can support that same organization's digital growth over the coming five to ten years. Developments such as cloud computing, video communication, IoT, smart buildings, cybersecurity and data-driven business processes are increasing the dependence on reliable digital infrastructure.

A nuance is needed here. It is a simplification to claim that every AI application automatically requires enormous local bandwidth. Much AI runs in the cloud and mainly places demands on a stable, redundant connection and low downtime, not necessarily on extreme bandwidth. The impact depends heavily on the type of organization and application. A design firm with heavy data flows has different requirements than an advisory organization. The broader point, however, extends beyond any individual case: the more digital the economy becomes, the more important the digital infrastructure of the physical work environment becomes. We elaborate on this further in AI and real estate.

The possible blind spot

Put the facts side by side and a striking picture emerges. The Netherlands has enormous amounts of information about its buildings. We know floor area, year of construction, use function, energy label, transactions, rents, energy consumption, accessibility and numerous location characteristics. For the physical and energy-related quality of a property, a rich, partly standardized layer of information exists.

But does an entrepreneur, broker, investor or policymaker also easily know what a building can handle digitally? That piece of information is missing from most files. Digital building capacity is barely a standard real estate characteristic yet, even though that very characteristic is becoming increasingly decisive for a property's usability. We previously described how this information is typically missing from leasing materials in IT infrastructure is missing from every leasing brochure.

The question, then, is a reasonable one. If our knowledge economy is becoming increasingly dependent on data, cloud and AI, isn't it time to make the digital quality of our building stock more visible, alongside its physical and energy quality? This is not a criticism of existing institutions, but an observation that a layer of information appears to be missing that could logically exist.

The role of a classification such as IT-Label

This is where a classification can play a role, not as a replacement for existing institutions but as a translation. CBS, the Rijksvastgoedbedrijf, telecom providers, technical audits and existing NEN, ISO and cybersecurity standards retain their own function. What is often missing is a way to translate all that technical information into a single, understandable real estate question: what is actually delivered digitally, and what can a user do with it?

An IT-Label makes visible how a building scores on topics such as connectivity, internal infrastructure, redundancy, scalability, digital continuity, building-related digital systems, cybersecurity-related provisions and options for future expansion. The classification runs from PREMIUM to SHELL and describes not whether a building is good or bad, but what a given level means in practice.

To illustrate how such a translation works, the delivery levels are outlined below. The classification always describes what digital provisions are present, not which building is better than another.

This creates a new layer of information for commercial real estate that fits the way the market already handles energy labels. Not as a final verdict, but as a starting point for a conversation about what a user actually needs.

A broader societal question

This issue extends beyond real estate alone. The Netherlands wants to remain a strong European digital economy and knowledge economy, and wants to attract and retain AI companies, technology companies and high-value employment. That requires data centers, energy, fiber networks and digital infrastructure, and there is no shortage of discussion about those major links in the chain.

Between the data center and the employee's laptop, however, there is still a physical link: the building. And that particular link seems to receive limited visibility in much real estate data. Heavy investment is going into networks and computing capacity, while it remains unclear whether the building in which people actually work can process and distribute that flow of data. We previously wrote about this tension in what is the point of investing in data centers if buildings are not yet AI-proof?.

The provocative question that remains: can we seriously speak of the Netherlands' AI-ready economy if we do not know how AI-ready our work environment actually is? This is not a rhetorical trick to force a problem into existence, but an invitation to take a missing piece of information seriously.

Next step: start with the building you know

You do not need to wait for national data to map the digital capacity of your own building or leased space. Start with the two layers described in this article: external connectivity (which connections, how many independent routes, what redundancy) and internal infrastructure (which cabling, technical rooms and scaling options). Set those questions against your digital ambitions for the coming years.

If you want to approach this inventory in a structured way, take a look at the IT-Label for property owners or, if you lease space, at what to pay attention to as a tenant. Anyone wanting to understand how the assessment is carried out can find an explanation in how the IT-Label works.

We know how many square meters of office space the Netherlands has. We know what buildings are worth, what energy label they carry and where they are located. But in an economy that is becoming ever more dependent on data and AI, one crucial question may be missing: what can those buildings actually handle digitally? If we do not know that, it is time to map that blind spot.