Digital Realty Is Spending €2 Billion to Turn Italy Into a Mediterranean Data Hub

Digital Realty is pouring €2 billion into Italy over the next five years. Two campuses across two cities: Rome gets a 62 MW facility opening in early 2027, Milan gets an 84 MW campus in Abbiategrasso with the first phase expected by 2028. The company is making a multi-billion-euro bet that the Mediterranean is the next major data center corridor in Europe.

The numbers tell the story clearly. Mediterranean markets represent 56% of Digital Realty's planned EMEA capital expenditure through 2030. A dramatic reweighting away from the traditional European data center hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Dublin. The FLAP markets still anchor existing capacity, but the growth capital is flowing south.

The Corridor Thesis

Digital Realty has been assembling pieces of a Mediterranean connectivity corridor for years, starting with Barcelona, Marseille, and Athens, and now adding Rome and Milan. Draw a line on a map from the Strait of Gibraltar to the eastern Mediterranean and every major subsea cable landing point along that route either has a Digital Realty facility or will have one under construction within 18 months.

Data traffic from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa enters Europe through the Mediterranean. Subsea cables from these regions land in Marseille, Barcelona, and increasingly in southern Italian ports. If you control the interconnection points where that traffic arrives, you control the first hop into European networks. That is where latency-sensitive workloads get processed, where content gets cached, and where AI inference increasingly happens. Digital Realty is building the on-ramps.

Alessandro Talotta, Digital Realty's Executive Managing Director for Italy, has been vocal about the strategic logic behind this investment. Italy sits at the geographic center of the Mediterranean basin. It has submarine cable connectivity to North Africa, the Middle East via the Suez route, and direct links to major Southern European metros. For a company building an interconnection-first strategy, Italy is a hub.

Rome vs. Milan: Different Roles, Same Bet

The two campuses serve different functions. Rome at 62 MW is the government and enterprise play. Italy's public sector is modernizing its digital infrastructure, the EU's digital sovereignty regulations are pushing data localization, and Rome is where the regulatory apparatus lives. A hyperscale-capable facility in the capital city gives Digital Realty access to government contracts, financial services firms, and the growing Italian cloud market.

Milan at 84 MW is the connectivity and enterprise play. Milan is Italy's financial capital, its largest corporate market, and its primary internet exchange point. The Abbiategrasso campus sits close enough to the Milan metro area to serve low-latency workloads while having access to the land, power, and water that urban sites cannot provide. At 84 MW for the first phase, this campus has room to grow well beyond its initial footprint.

Together, the two facilities give Digital Realty redundancy within a single country. Enterprises can deploy primary workloads in Milan and disaster recovery in Rome, or vice versa, while staying within Italian jurisdiction. That matters for data residency compliance under GDPR and the EU's evolving AI Act requirements.

The Gigafactory Conversation

The bigger play is still taking shape. Digital Realty is reportedly in discussions with the Italian government about an EU-backed AI gigafactory that could reach approximately 200 MW. This would be a facility purpose-built for AI training workloads, funded in part by EU industrial policy money, and designed to give European companies access to sovereign AI compute capacity.

A 200 MW AI training facility is a cooling problem before it is anything else. At the power densities required for modern GPU clusters, that facility would need somewhere between 60 and 80 MW of cooling capacity, depending on the PUE target and the climate conditions at the site. Italy's Mediterranean climate means warm summers with ambient temperatures that push air cooling to its limits. Any serious AI gigafactory in central or southern Italy will need liquid cooling as its primary thermal management strategy. There is no way around the thermodynamics.

The cooling infrastructure for a facility of that scale would require multiple large CDUs, a facility water system capable of rejecting tens of megawatts of heat, and either cooling towers or dry coolers sized for peak summer conditions. The capital cost for the cooling plant alone would run into the hundreds of millions of euros. This is where the partnership between Digital Realty and cooling equipment vendors like Vertiv, Schneider, and Alfa Laval becomes critical.

Workforce and Local Impact

Digital Realty has committed to hiring hundreds of local staff to support the Italian operations. That commitment matters for permitting and community relations, but it also highlights the workforce challenge. Italy does not have a deep bench of data center operations professionals. The country's engineering talent is strong, particularly in mechanical and electrical disciplines, but the specific expertise needed to operate high-density, liquid-cooled AI infrastructure is scarce everywhere. It is especially scarce in markets that are just now building their first hyperscale facilities.

Training programs and partnerships with Italian universities and technical institutes will need to be stood up from scratch. The timeline for the Rome facility, opening in early 2027, means that hiring and training needs to begin immediately if the operations team is going to be ready for commissioning.

What This Means for the Cooling Market

Digital Realty's Italian bet is a cooling procurement event measured in hundreds of millions of euros. Between the Rome and Milan campuses, the potential gigafactory, and whatever expansion phases follow, the total cooling equipment demand from these projects alone could sustain a mid-size cooling vendor for years. The vendors that win the initial design and specification work will have a built-in advantage for expansion phases and maintenance contracts that last decades.

The Mediterranean corridor is also a climate story. These facilities will operate in warmer ambient conditions than Northern European data centers. Free cooling hours drop, and mechanical cooling loads rise proportionally. The delta between a well-designed cooling plant and a mediocre one, measured in operating cost per megawatt per year, is larger in warm climates than in cold ones. The cooling vendors that understand Mediterranean climate engineering will carry an advantage that years of Northern European project experience alone cannot replicate.

Digital Realty is building two data centers in Italy and positioning the entire Mediterranean corridor as the growth vector for European data infrastructure. The €2 billion is the opening bid.