In the last six months, Spain has established itself as the preferred European destination for data center companies. Since last spring to date, the country has attracted more than a dozen investment projects for the construction of data centers worth 34.1 billion euros. The aforementioned amount is derived from the sum of the commitments announced since last May by American giants such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Blackstone, but also Spanish giants such as Iberdrola, Nabiax, Equinix, Merlin or Box2Bit, as well as the Emirati Damac.
Meta plans to invest 750 million euros in a data center in the Torrehierro industrial estate, near Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), capable of generating 250 direct jobs in the area. This project, approved by the Government of Castilla-La Mancha last Wednesday, will provide service in Europe to applications such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook.
To the Toledo Meta project is added the one promoted in Aragon by the American investment fund blackstonethrough his company QTS Data Centers. This is a program endowed with 7.5 billion euros and whose employment generation will be around 1,400 direct jobs during the construction and operation phases.
The company DGNEX Data Centers, global provider of digital infrastructures of the Dubai group Damachas acquired a 22,000 square meter plot of land to install its first data center in Spain. The facilities will be located in the Vicálvaro area (Madrid), with a planned investment of 400 million euros, and with the intention of replicating the model in Barcelona and Zaragoza, among other Spanish enclaves.”
The socimi Merlin Properties prepares 2,000 million to create a large European hub of European centers in Barcelona. To compensate for the decline in the office business, the company will bet on “concrete, steel, copper, cables and technologies,” according to what the listed company told the newspaper La Vanguardia.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has promised to allocate more than 15.7 billion euros in Aragon and create 17,500 jobs. The contribution to the GDP of this record bet in the Aragonese community is estimated at 21.6 billion until 2033.
Besides, Iberdrola has announced global investments in Data Center worth 10,000 million, but without specifying the amount allocated in Spain. However, sources in the sector estimate that the bet on a large data center in Bilbao alone will be around 2,000 million euros, in alliance with Dominion and Kutxabank. This data center is outside Madrid and Barcelona as it is located in the Euskadi Atlantic Data Infrastructure project, it will handle 200 MW.
Microsoft has done the same with 1,933 million euros between 2024 and 2025, allocated to the new cloud region of data centers in Spain, located in the Community of Madrid. According to its estimates, according to data from the consulting firm IDC, the software giant will generate 10.7 billion euros to the Spanish GDP and will create nearly 77,000 new jobs over the next six years.
Oracle has announced investments of 920 million euros for the next ten years. With these funds, the American company will open a new cloud region in Madrid located in two Telefónica data centers (qualified Tier 3+).
Among the operations of recent months, but of lesser value, is the expansion of the data center of Equinix in Hospitalet de Llobregat, worth 52 million euros. Box2bitowned by Capital Energy, has also unveiled the construction of a data center in a 400,000 square meter complex in Calatayud, with investments of 1,000 million euros.
Iberdrola’s global investment is around 10,000 million, of which 2,000 could go to Spain
In turn, the Spanish Nabiax plans to invest 47 million euros in expanding the capacity of its data centers in Alcalá de Henares and Julián Camarillo, both in Madrid. The French company OVHcloud It has also chosen Madrid to establish one of its five European zones, but for now without detailing its investment plans.
Manuel Giménez, executive director of the data center association SpainDCexplained to elEconomista.es that a large part of Spain’s attractiveness for the data center business lies in the fact that the country “is one of the main producers of renewable energy in the world. There is a lot of sun and a lot of wind, and that is essential for data centers, which run on 100% renewable energy. But there are also two other reasons: location and connectivity. “Spain is located in a strategic point, between Europe, Africa and America and also has a solid network of connections (land and sea) and one of the best logistics infrastructures in the world.” All of the above allows us to understand the investment appetite in Spain.
In fact, adds Giménez, “the data center sector is expected to experience unprecedented growth in our country, multiplying the currently installed capacity by six.” European Union regulations, which require that data generated by European users be managed on the Old Continent, require cloud multinationals to install their data centers on continental soil in order to preserve data sovereignty.
Technology companies need to invest in the Old Continent to guarantee the continental sovereignty of the data of their European users
The advantageous conditions to have land, promoted by the Autonomous Communities receiving investments, add incentives for data center investors. For example, Madrid expects to receive investments of 6 billion euros in the next three years from the data center sector.
The attractiveness of Spain to attract the so-called hyperscalers is presumed overwhelming, compared to other European destinations that until now enjoyed the favor of the giants of the sector, such as France, the Netherlands, Germany or the United Kingdom.
For all of the above, except Google -which since 2022 has only had the Europe-Southwest 1 in Madrid-, the rest of the big tech companies have agreed on their tastes to locate their respective data centers for clouds on Spanish soil
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