Another large data center campus lands in a town in Aragon. After closing a commitment 15.7 billion euros coming from Amazon last spring, the community now secures another 7.5 billion to continue building these key infrastructures of the digital society in Calatorao, in the province of Zaragoza. The difference is that now they don’t come from Google, Microsoft or any of Amazon’s rivals in the cloud business. The investor is Blackstone, the largest owner of rental homes in Spain.
The fund thus becomes the second largest investor in data centers in the country, surpassing the 6.6 billion that Microsoft allocated (also) to Aragon in June. Blackstone says the new infrastructure will create 1,400 jobs in the town, which now has fewer than 3,000 residents, and will add tens of billions to the region’s GDP. In September, its real estate manager in Europe already announced that he had his sights set on the “emerging” data center business in Spain.
In its last balance sheet, presented in July, the fund already controlled a portfolio of data centers valued at around €50 billion. Since then, it has not only announced the deployment of Aragón, but has also disbursed another 15 billion to buy AirTrunk, a developer based in Australia that manages this type of digital infrastructure throughout the Asia-Pacific area. Steve Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chief executive, has revealed that the fund has been selling office buildings in the US in recent years to undertake these operations.
The investment bank – known as a vulture fund in Spain for its controversial purchase acquisitions and rent increases – is one of those that is shifting more markedly from traditional brick to artificial intelligence factories. But not the only one. The Damac group, from Dubai, announced this week its entry into the data center business in Spain through its subsidiary Edgnex. The company will launch a 40 MW center with an investment of 400 million euros. Meanwhile, executives of the Chinese giant GDS Holdings, as published by El Confidencialhave met with Telefónica executives and members of the Government to invest in data centers in our country in 2025, which would be the first investment outside Asia for this company.
According to Linklaters40% of the investments of the 50 main real estate funds globally are already allocated to the construction of catos centers. The calculations of Statista They suggest that the profit of this business will grow at a rate of 8.5% annually until 2030.
Spain on the horizon
Spain is one of the emerging markets in this explosion of data centers. There are two factors that justify it, according to authorities and experts.
On the one hand, “it has a strategic geographical position, as it has submarine cables that reach our coasts and allow us to connect different continents,” they explain from SpainDC, the data center association. The traditional flow of data in Europe links the continent with the United States through the axis known as “FLAP” (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris). The peninsula offers a better opportunity for new connections with Africa and South America and a much less saturated market than its northern competition.
Also much greater electrical availability. “The second strength is that these data processing centers consume a lot of energy. There we have an enormous competitive advantage in the possibility of producing abundant renewable energy,” completed the former Minister of Digital Transformation, José Luis Escrivá, now governor of the Bank of Spain, in an interview with elDiario.es.
While companies like Google or Amazon are forced to reach agreements with nuclear energy suppliers For the electrification of its data centers in the US, Spain offers facilities for these infrastructures to be awarded the “100% renewable” label. A relevant seal given the debate on artificial intelligence and its sustainability that is developing both among legislators and in civil society.
Water use concessions, another critical aspect for the installation of data centers, are not posing a problem for companies that want to set up in Spain either. Although both these companies and local and regional administrations they refuse to disclose water consumption planned of these infrastructures, the employers assure that the figures have been exaggerated. “The new generation data centers that are being developed, none of them have water consumption,” they maintain.
The season is open for Spanish companies
The situation is causing companies in sectors not directly related to the digital business to rush for a piece of this pie. Especially in the cases of those that do have the capacity to supply some of the key pillars: the adequate space to install them (technically, the closer to the companies and people they will serve, the better), the energy or experience in managing infrastructure for third parties.
This is what happens in the case of Iberdrola. In September, the energy company launched a new subsidiary, CPD4Green, whose objective is to offer “turnkey” spaces to companies that want to build them: the land, the electrical connection prepared for large consumption, the renewable energy contract and the installation to ensure the 24-7 supply. Iberdrola is looking for a capital partner to be responsible for providing the money to build and operate the data centers.
The company chaired by Ignacio Galán has identified 11 possible locations for these facilities. Data centers are measured in megawatts (MW) of installed power: up to 10 MW is considered small; from there up to 50 MW, medium; and beyond, great. Iberdrola states that it wants to secure a capacity of 400 MW in the coming months and be operating around 200 MW between the different data centers by 2030. Its calculations are that this infrastructure will account for 10% of global energy consumption. According to the International Energy Institutein 2023 they did not reach 2%, although esteem which will have reached 4% by 2026.
Also in the energy sector, Solaria has signed up for this business, the renewable energy company that is trying to respond to its drop in income in the traditional business with the diversification of service provision, access and energy to data centers. Solaria assures that it already has 270 MW of guaranteed capacity to respond to the demand for data centers and has set a target of 1,000 MW.
Another of the large Spanish companies that wants to do business managing data centers is ACS, which has moved to the final phase of the auction process to acquire Nabiax, one of the main data center companies in Spain. Nabiax was founded in 2019 from the sale of 11 data centers owned by Telefónica to the Asterion fund for 550 million euros. Two years later, the telecom put four other centers on the table in exchange for 20% of the company’s shares.
At the end of last year Asterion and Telefónica put Nabiax up for sale, hoping to raise about 1,000 million euros. ACS submitted one of the highest non-binding bids for the company, which gave it access to the final phase, in which it will receive more specific data on the operation that will allow it to put a binding offer on the table. Nabiax has 28 MW of installed power in Spain and hopes that its sales operation will allow it to double it in a few years.
However, this move would not be the first that ACS has made in this sector. At the end of 2023, the group announced the construction of a 50 MW data center in Alcalá de Henares that it hopes to have operational by 2025. Similar to Blackstone, the construction company began the shift towards the digital infrastructure business years ago. Today it has in its asset portfolio giants such as Turner, one of the largest US contractors specialized in data centers and gigafactories, or CIMIC, an Australian construction giant that is also focusing on these facilities and gaining positions in the mining of copper, aluminum, lithium, cobalt or nickel, key resources for the digital industry.
Another of the large Spanish companies to make a move in this direction has been El Corte Inglés. This October, the firm acquired 100% of the Spanish subsidiary of KIO Networks, a Mexican company that had expanded to Spain in recent years. It has a data center in Murcia and is finalizing preparations to start another in Paterna (Valencia). Its power is much more modest (2.4 MW in total) but it will have level IV security, the highest in the sector. The company assures that there are only 47 of these centers in the world, four of them in Spain.
KIO’s investment in Paterna reached 50 million euros. The figures for the acquisition by El Corte Inglés have not been revealed, although the company already had 50% of its shares. Sources from El Corte Inglés have refused to give more details about the operation or whether there are plans to convert its real estate assets into data centers in the future, although they explain that KIO will continue to operate as an independent company.
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