Italy's Data Center Market Profile

Milan data centers: driving transformation at the digital heart of Italy  

Italy is the world’s 8th largest economy with $1.82 trillion GDP and this is reflected in the country’s connectivity and digital infrastructure ecosystem. This consists of more than 131 commercial colocation data centers, with almost 200 cloud service providers linked to seven network fabrics.  

From new cloud engagements to major new facilities and renewable power purchasing agreements, Italy’s data center market footprint is growing rapidly with several giant new facilities and projects due for completion over the next two to four years.  

By some estimates, the Italian data center market will grow at 3.8% CAGR between 2021 and 2026. 

Examples of investments include Italy’s largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, which recently signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with Google, along with Telecom Italia to provide the bank with cloud services from two Google cloud regions using Telecom Italia’s data centers. 

Microsoft announced plans for $1.5 billion of investment over the next five years to supply Azure in Italy and a partnership with Poste Italiane including its first cloud data center region. 

In August 2022 Compass Datacenters and Hines Italy , the global real estate firm, announced the acquisition of land in the Milan metro area with the intention to build one of the largest data center campuses in Italy. The 2.3 million square feet Noviglio-located site aims to support 48MW+ of IT load with construction to begin in 2023. 

Alongside this, AWS signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) of 66MW with two Engie’s solar PV farms in Southern Italy.  

Italy’s large commercial data center sites are operated by over 50 different colocation and hosting companies.  

Currently around 20 of Italy’s facilities are classified as carrier neutral.  

Milan  

The digital heart of Italy can be found in and around Milan, with dozens of providers operating more than 32 data centers. 

Milan is the primary location for colocation operators and is attracting growing investments from major cloud service providers. It is the location for one of three AWS edge facilities in Italy.  

Key investors in Italy’s data center market include Colt, Noovle, Aruba, Stack EMEA Italy, Data4, Equinix, Retelit/Irideos, Vantage Data Centers , Equinix and Rai Way Edge.

Global providers like Atos, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei Technologies and IBM are major IT and services players in the Italian data center market. 

EXA Infrastructure interlinks colocation facilities across Europe and North America including EXA data center Milan, from where data center equipment is integrated onto the EXA fibre power network.

The Italian data center sector continues to attract investments from real estate, infrastructure and private equity. Much of this investment is focused on the financial, manufacturing, industrial and logistics center of Milan which continues to grow as Italy’s primary data center market attracting global hyperscale operators, along with international and local colocation service providers.