B2B telco operator Retelit has begun construction of its new data center in Corsico, southwest of Milan, Italy.

It comes after the company purchased the land in the former industrial area near a ring road from steelmaker Marcegaglia a few months ago.

The facility will span 193,750 sq ft (18,000 sqm) across two identical buildings and will have a capacity of 13.6MW to support AI workloads.

Retelit said that the data center will be built using advanced technologies with low environmental impact and will meet strict reliability standards required by major cloud providers.

It will use closed-loop water cooling systems to protect the local water table, which will be integrated with liquid cooling systems for AI servers able to generate more heat than traditional servers. 

Waste heat from the data center will be repurposed to power local homes and businesses.

The Corsico data center will become part of Retelit’s Avalon Campus ecosystem, which the company said is the largest neutral colocation data center ecosystem in Italy. The hub hosts more than 170 operators, content delivery networks, media companies, and OTTs.

The project is part of the operator’s three-year investment plan worth €350 million ($411m) announced last year by chief executive Jorge Álvarez.

Álvarez said: “We strongly believe in Italy's role as the future digital hub of the Mediterranean and we want to support this growth by investing in data centers, which are the essential pillars underpinning the technological developments tied to AI and remain a crucial asset of our strategy.

“Consistent with our past approach, we have once again chosen to build on an already developed site, combining sustainability with excellence in performance, security, reliability, and efficiency.”

The Corsico municipal administration said: “Data centers are strategic national infrastructure, essential to supporting progress through technology.

“We believe it is important that our territory has once again become attractive for high-value innovative investment, regenerating brownfield areas in keeping with environmental sustainability and through waste heat recovery fed into the district heating network - creating a virtuous model of development."

Retelit’s investment strategy also includes the development of another facility in Milan Bisceglie.

The company owns and operates 38 data centers across Italy, which it said are “crucial” for reducing latency and contributing to Italy’s digital sovereignty.

Last October, the telco completed the acquisition of BT Italy’s operations, expanding its fiber optic network to over 47,000 km (29,204 miles) and adding four data centers in the metropolitan areas of Rome and Milan to its network.

Retelit was reportedly looking to sell its data center portfolio for €700m ($830m). According to Bloomberg, quoting sources familiar with the matter, the company was in the early stages of planning the sale, which could take place in 2027. However, Bloomberg’s sources stressed that no decisions had been made.

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