New ICT hubs emerging among CEE and secondary cities

The ICT sector has been a key engine of economic growth for European cities over the last 25 years. And while certain established tech centres remain dominant, more recently, many smaller but more dynamic hubs have been emerging across the region. These have often been among Central & Eastern European (CEE) or secondary Western cities—providing plentiful opportunities for successful investment at lower costs.

• Europe’s urban areas have been at the centre of the ICT sector’s strong activity, with 170 or so major cities accounting for almost 80% of Europe’s total output. Since 2000, the contribution of the ICT sector to European city economies has more than doubled, rising from 4% to 10% in 2025. Within the broader ICT sector, programming, consultancy & data services, and telecoms have seen the strongest gains—reflecting surging demand for data and media.
• London, Paris, and Dublin dominate in terms of scale of ICT activity, though in the Irish capital the numbers have been inflated by transfers of intellectual property rights by multinationals. But among these established tech centres, there are also some relative newcomers. Prague, Bucharest, and Warsaw all rank within the top 15 in Europe for the size of their ICT sectors, benefitting from lower costs, robust digital infrastructures, and well-educated workforces with high English proficiency.
• There are also smaller secondary cities that have achieved much faster growth in ICT than their larger capital counterparts over the past 10 years. In particular, Iasi (Romania’s third-largest city) and Middlesbrough stand out here, with several Polish cities also performing very strongly. Other examples of secondary cities’ outperformance in ICT include Porto outpacing Lisbon, Aarhus growing at twice the pace of Copenhagen, and Nantes and Toulouse emerging as key hubs in France. Finally, it is also worth acknowledging Nicosia, Valetta, Vilnius, and Tallinn for their increasing prominence in the European tech scene.

Chart 1: Many smaller cities have seen much faster growth in ICT than the established centres