Infracorp, over EUR 600 million plan in airports, data centres and space

Infracorp launches a plan worth over 600 million with a focus on Italia. At the helm is Filippo Ghirelli, who appeared in March in the list of billionaires drawn up by Forbes: a 46-year-old Italian engineer, resident in Monaco, he has assets estimated at around USD 1.6 billion today. With experience in energy and infrastructure, he founded the investment company in 2024.

From the various entrepreneurial ventures developed in the past and then sold, such as Genera Group and a series of facilities in South America and the Middle East, I created Sophrance, a family office that is financing Infracorp's projects in the various strands: mid- and small-scale airport concessions, data centres with decentralised AI, power generation and finally space. The idea is to create a collector of systemic infrastructure projects. Today we have infrastructures that don't talk to each other: our intuition is to make them communicating instead, through a territorial digital twin, for their thoughtful, non-emergency, data-driven planning. We are developing a proprietary AI platform to create digital twins for global infrastructure with the intention of serving large investment funds, developers and national governments.

Infracorp was born with the acquisition of Aeropolis, based in Turin, which in turn bought from public shareholders, i.e. local municipalities, provinces and the region, the majority of the management company of Villanova d'Albenga airport, renamed Riviera Airport. Now the idea is to acquire medium and small secondary airports, those under 250,000 passengers per year, which also include airports used only by aeroclubs, with a few thousand flights a year, and to relaunch them as private aviation hubs, also making agreements with luxury companies, to develop an infrastructure that can host shops, showrooms, but also spaces for coworking, start-ups, events, and logistics. In addition to bringing excellence in aviation maintenance back to Italia. Strengthening inter-regional connections also by following the Regional Air Mobility plan launched last year by Enac Servizi, which manages some twenty small airports. We are looking at airports in Emilia Romagna, Lazio, Calabria, and Sicily. By 2026 we expect to proceed with the acquisition of at least three airports, with a subsequent investment in infrastructure of 104 million, and to structure the preliminary contracts for at least seven by 2027, for a further 175 million.

They are designed for the development of decentralised AI, i.e. working with national data, obfuscating them internally, i.e. keeping not only data but industrial best practices confidential. Creating expertise and information asymmetry that contributes to the competitiveness of our industrial fabric. What happens to the data of our companies on which an AI acts in another country such as the US or Turkey? It is an issue of sovereignty: for greater security, the learning part must be nationalised. We are developing 12 data centres throughout Italia: Milan, Turin, Bologna, but also Sicily and Apulia, offering connections to Africa and the Balkans, with equivalent computing power of about 1.4 GW. We have already optioned the land and started the authorisation process, including applications for connection to Terna's high-voltage grid, in order to bring ready-to-build projects to potential investors by 2028. The total investment for the development alone, which also includes the energy supply part, reaches EUR 275 million. We also have projects in France (four), Spain (two), the UK, and the US (one each).

Yes, energy projects in turn are linked to data centres: we have a 580 MW pipeline of plants that supply them with energy. They are all over the country, 60% in the Centre-South, cogeneration, that is gas, and from renewable sources, including batteries.