A company is proposing a €30 billion ($33 bn) data center project in Italy, according to a local minister.
As reported by Reuters, Industry Minister Adolfo Urso has said Italy has been chosen as the location for a major data center investment by a single foreign corporation.
"The other day another data center multinational told me it wants to invest – on its own – €30 billion in data centers in Italy, because Italy is the ideal place for data centers: a G7 country in the Mediterranean, a crossroad of global information routes,” Urso told a gathering of Assolombarda, the business lobby for Milan's Lombardy region.
Further details weren’t shared.
Such investment could likely total gigawatts of capacity in what is traditionally considered a second-tier data center market. For context, Blackstone’s 1.1GW QTS project in the northeast of England is set to see up to £10 billion ($13.3bn) invested.
Few data center operators will have access to such a large amount of capital. Each of the US cloud hyperscalers – Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Oracle – has existing data center footprints in the country.
Microsoft's Italian cloud region is located in Milan. The company first announced plans for an Italian Azure region in Milan back in May 2020, with it launching in 2023. It recently announced plans to invest a further €4.3 billion ($4.75bn) expanding its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in the country.
It was the last of the US cloud hyperscalers to launch in Italy. AWS launched its Milan cloud region in 2020.
Oracle launched its first Italian region in Milan in late 2021, and earlier this year the company announced plans for a second Italian cloud region in Turin in partnership with Telecom Italia (TIM).
Google’s first cloud region opened in Milan in 2022; a second Italian GCP region has since launched in Turin.
