Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat of Catalonia are exploring building a data center in a basement in the La Sagrera area of Barcelona.
The Government Commission of Barcelona City Council has approved the agreement to look into the possibility of a data center, which would span around 10,600 sqm (114,097 sq ft) and have a power capacity between 12-15MW.
The site planned for the data center resides beneath a soccer field.
The infrastructure needed for the data center is already built, and the Districlima Network, a heating and cooling network that runs under the city streets in Barcelona, would be able to assist with efficient energy management.
In addition, the data center could play a key role in the project to land an underwater telecommunications cable from the eastern Mediterranean in the Besòs area.
Developing the data center is not anticipated to delay any works or deadlines of different infrastructure and equipment in the area.
Based on the preliminary studies, the data center would reserve around 20 percent of its capacity for the two public administrations exploring its potential, with two percent for Barcelona City Council, and 18 percent for the Generalitat of Catalonia.
The project notes the relevance of the European cloud strategy that aims to ensure companies and public authorities have access to secure, sustainable, and interoperable cloud infrastructures and services. To enable this, thousands of nodes such as the basement data center are planned to be deployed across the continent.
The city council and Generalitat are giving themselves a year to carry out the mandatory analyses regarding the potential of the project.
Earlier this year, Monaco Telecom announced plans to build a data center in the basement of a new residential tower. Basement data centers are often used as an additional physical security layer for data centers in regions with ongoing conflict. In January 2024, Oracle announced that its second data center in Israel would be built nine floors below ground, while MedOne is also looking to develop two underground data centers in the nation.
Barcelona is home to the Edged Energy 'Merlin Edged Barcelona' data center which has a critical load capacity of 16MW and uses 100 percent renewable energy. In August 2023, GTR confirmed that it would be building a 16MW data center in Barcelona. Equinix is also developing a second data center in Barcelona.
According to DataCenterMap, Barcelona is home to 21 data centers.
A version of this story appeared on our Spanish edition
