Italian broadcasting tower operator Rai Way has received planning permission for a €400 million ($461m) hyperscale data center in Pomezia, south of Rome.

The campus will span 1.5 million sq ft (140,000 sqm) and will include data halls totaling 172,000 sq ft (16,000 sqm) distributed across four independent buildings. Each of these buildings will be divided into four 10,700 sq ft (1,000 sqm) data halls, with a capacity of 8.8MW.

Announced via LinkedIn, the total capacity will be 35.2MW, with potential for further expansion.

The campus architecture will be “highly flexible” to meet the needs of hyperscale and cloud customers and will have customizable density, layout, and cooling systems.

The campus is awaiting authorization for a 5.5MW photovoltaic plant to partially power it, but will ultimately be 100 percent powered by renewable energy.

Rai Way said that the campus’s location in Pomezia, in the Rome area, “reflects specific strategic considerations.” The company first began talks with relevant authorities to obtain permission for the first phase of the company’s planned 36MW hyperscale data center in Rome in 2024.

Rome is a central hub for Italy’s digital infrastructure and has access to the main Mediterranean submarine cable landing stations.

Rai Way is the main subsidiary of the Italian public broadcaster Rai. It is responsible for managing and developing its broadcasting infrastructure.

Italian minister for enterprises, Adolfo Urso, said: “In an era in which data management has become an issue affecting both cultural identity and national security, the hyperscale project marks a concrete step forward on the path toward the country’s full digital sovereignty.

“This data center will ensure that Rai’s heritage – a heritage belonging to all Italians – is safeguarded within a secure, resilient infrastructure rooted in the national territory.”

Giampaolo Rossi, CEO of Rai, said: “The hyperscale data center in the municipality of Pomezia represents an important milestone for Rai Way and for the entire Rai Group, in line with the company’s transformation into a modern digital media company.

“This is a hub of great strategic value not only in terms of innovation, digital transition, and Rai’s industrial development, but also for the surrounding area, the local economy, and the country as a whole.

Rai has committed to investing €140m ($151.6m) in developing data centers in the country related to the roll-out of its ‘diversification initiatives’ by 2027.

This includes a network of five primary Edge data centers in the main northern Italian cities of Milan, Turin, Florence, Genoa, and Venice.

The sites provide a combined capacity of over 1.6MW and are part of Rai’s plans to deploy 18 Edge data centers across 20 Italian regions for a combined IT capacity of 3.4MW, as well as a 4MW data center in Milan and a 40MW data center in Rome.

RAI has committed to investing €140m ($151.6m) in developing data centers in the country related to the roll-out of its ‘diversification initiatives’ by 2027.

In 2024, the broadcaster announced plans to sell a 15 percent stake in Rai Way to fund its €225m ($260m) business plan, while the Italian government was preparing a decree in March 2024 to enable a merger between Rai Way and EI Towers valued at more than €2bn ($2.3bn).

The following year, Rai Way integrated Cubbit's cloud storage technology across five of its Italian data centers, providing five petabytes of encrypted storage capacity, while Oracle also signed an agreement to deploy AI infrastructure at Rai Way's data centers.

Learn more about the data center market in Italy and Southern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Milan event later this year