The data economy can be seen: data centre boom, Milan a candidate as European centre

The Milanese marketplace is mainly driven by high-power data centres, those above 10 MW, which alone account for 37% of the total active power and 70% of which are concentrated in the Milan area. These are the infrastructures preferred by large cloud providers, interested in operating in Italy through colocation agreements.

Announcements confirm this: Amazon Web Services has put on the table a 1.2 billion euro plan to expand its presence in the country; Microsoft, BlackRock and Nvidia have launched a global fund of over 30 billion dollars dedicated to artificial intelligence, part of which is earmarked for the strengthening of Redmond's Italian infrastructure. Domestic operators are also on the move: Aruba has opened the first campus facilities at the Tecnopolo Tiburtino, while Tim is preparing the inauguration of its new Rome data centre by 2026.

It is no longer just cloud or e-commerce that drives demand, but, today, it is artificial intelligence that is radically changing the physiognomy of data centres. The exponential growth of the AI market in Italy and the direct impact on the design of facilities are the drivers of data management infrastructures: new liquid cooling systems, high-density racks, servers designed for much higher computing loads.

The most obvious consequence is the installed power capacity, which grew by 17% in 2024, to 513 MW IT. But the increase is not enough to tell the scale of the phenomenon: AI is leading to a significant increase in power density per rack, which multiplies the overall energy demand.

At the same time, some structural factors have begun to weigh heavily: Italy has an energy cost that is higher than the European average and about twice as high as Spain, which has instead massively incentivised production from renewables. This risks holding back investment at a time when the country is emerging as one of the most attractive emerging markets.

It is here that the most delicate knot of this development scenario emerges: the energy issue. The Politecnico's Observatory reports that the requests received by Terna for new connections to be allocated to data centres amount to 19.7 GW, i.e. 38 times the power actually installed in Italy today. An enormous figure, reported by analysts themselves as 'inflated' by speculative phenomena, but which highlights a fact: potential demand, also driven by hyperscalers, far exceeds the capacity of the national grid.

The risk is not only infrastructural - slowing down connections to high-voltage lines, overloading of higher density areas - but also territorial. The excessive concentration in the Milan area replicates, in a small way, what happened in Amsterdam and Dublin, where regulatory constraints and limits on new openings were introduced after episodes of network saturation. It is, to use the report's words, a 'twofold challenge': to better distribute the infrastructure and make the energy market more competitive compared to abroad.

Driven by the opportunities opening up for the country system, politics has started to move. In 2024 specific bills arrived, which were discussed in the Chamber of Deputies, and above all the guidelines of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security to harmonise the environmental and design aspects of data centres, a step that appears to be decisive in reducing bureaucracy and encouraging new openings

The stakes are high: the development of digital markets, starting with Italy's software supply chain, which in 2023 generated a EUR 62.8 billion turnover, depends directly on the country's ability to consolidate and deploy its digital infrastructure

The data economy is no longer an abstract concept: it is made up of buildings, installed power, gigawatts required, billions invested. It is a physical economy that consumes energy, demands territories, and needs clear rules. Italy is at a crucial moment: it finally has the attention of investors, a strategic position in the Mediterranean and a productive fabric that requires modern infrastructure to compete.

The real challenge now is not to repeat the mistakes of the saturated markets of Northern Europe and to build a sustainable model in terms of energy, land and industry. If it succeeds in this endeavour, the country can be a serious candidate to become a European infrastructure hub. If it fails, the risk is to see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity vanish at a time when the data economy is changing the geography of innovation.