Spanish energy company Iberdrola wants to build a data center portfolio.
The company is looking for partners for a new joint venture that will aim to provide 200MW of data center capacity in Spain by 2030, according to a report from Bloomberg Law.
Its long-term goal is a data center empire boasting 1.2GW of capacity, Bloomberg Law said, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Iberdrola wants to create a joint venture where it would be the minority stakeholder. It is working with financial advisors to find a partner company for the JV, and total investment in the project could be up to €2 billion ($2.13bn).
Bilbao-based Iberdrola has more than 40,000 customers globally and manages grid capacity of more than 60,000MW. It is one of the largest suppliers of renewable energy globally, and has Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with some of the biggest names in the data center industry.
In March, it agreed to a PPA with Amazon, which will see the company buy wind energy generated at Iberdrola’s East Anglia Three offshore wind farm, off the coast of the UK in the North Sea. The two companies have also signed PPAs for wind and solar capacity in Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific.
Iberdrola has also signed PPAs with Meta in the US and Vodafone and O2 Telefónica in Europe.
It hopes a move into the data center market will help drive demand for its core business, the Bloomberg News report said.
Spain’s data center sector is booming, and a recent report from DC Byte highlighted the rapid growth in the Madrid market, where the data center pipeline and early-stage supply grew from 13MW in 2018 to more than 500MW in 2023.
As with other markets around the world, the growth in AI services is driving demand, and Microsoft has committed to investing €1.97 billion ($2.1bn) in cloud computing and AI in Spain overthe next two years.