Lombardy sets data centre rules as Italy eyes €22 billion boom

By Giancarlo Navach

MILAN, June 10 (Reuters) - The Lombardy region, with Milan at its heart, has approved a law intended as a framework to regulate and manage demand for data centres, a sector expected to boom over the next five years with investments estimated at around €22 billion ($25 billion) in Italy, regional councilor Massimo Sertori told Reuters. 

At the same time, the southern region of Puglia is positioning itself as one of the main digital hubs in southern Italy and the Mediterranean area.

"Italy is set to see the construction of approximately 3 gigawatts of new data centre capacity; of these, 1.5 to 2 gigawatts will be built in Lombardy over the next five years," Sertori said, adding that €10 to €12 billion were likely to go to Lombardy out of the total €22 billion investment.

The regional authorities in Lombardy plan to make it cheaper for developers to use brownfield sites, rather than building on farmland or parks.

According to a study by researchers at the Data Center Observatory of Milan's Politecnico University, the Milan area remains Italy's main data centre hub, accounting for 68% of the country's total installed nominal power capacity in the sector.

The city also accounts for 23% of all investments announced in the sector at the European level, the study said.

"Rather than simply enduring it, it is better to manage this process, which will continue regardless and is inevitable. For this reason, we aim to simplify procedures," Sertori said.

"We are pushing for these investments to be made on brownfield sites — abandoned industrial areas — and strongly encouraging that they not be built on agricultural land or undeveloped sites," he added.

"If the request involves agricultural land, construction charges will be 100% higher, and 200% higher in parks or sensitive areas."

PUGLIA SEES CHANCE TO PROSPER

Over the 2026-2028 period, 30 companies — including 19 new operators — have announced 83 new infrastructure projects in Italy with a total potential value of €25.4 billion, the Politecnico study said.

However, 72% of these investments come from new international operators not yet active in Italy, and timelines could be extended by the lack of a standardized approval process.

Costs are also a challenge. Building the infrastructure alone for a 100 MW data centre — excluding servers — costs around €1 billion on average, equivalent to roughly €10 million per MW, an industry source said.

Italy hosts around 205 data centres, mainly concentrated around Rome and Milan, but Puglia is also seeking to benefit from the trend, particularly around Bari, the regional capital, thanks to submarine fibre-optic cables landing there.

Among the projects are plans to convert the area of a former tobacco factory in Bari into a 200 MW data centre, with work due to start at the end of the year.

"There are several project proposals in the Bari area because this is where connectivity from the Middle East and other regions arrives through the Adriatic," Eugenio Di Sciascio, Puglia's regional councilor for economic development, told Reuters. 

"This facilitates the presence of these facilities. We are receiving double-digit numbers of requests to build data centres," he added.

($1 = 0.8657 euros)

(Editing by Keith Weir)