On 24 July 2026 the Italian Council of Ministers did something that had never been done for this sector in Italy: it declared two data centre programmes to be ‘of pre-eminent national strategic interest’. This is no courtesy formula — it is an administrative act, provided for by Article 13 of the so-called Decreto Asset (Italy's ‘Asset Decree’), which changes the rules of the game for two projects worth around €4 billion each: seven new data centres in the Milan area and a hyperscale campus in the Vercelli area.
It is worth understanding exactly what has happened, because it touches on a subject we have covered before: European digital sovereignty — and the far-from-theoretical difference between announcing an infrastructure and switching it on.
What ‘national strategic interest’ means
In practice, the declaration activates a dedicated administrative fast track: for each programme, a special government commissioner will be appointed, in agreement with the regions concerned, with the task of coordinating the authorities involved, speeding up the issue of the single authorisation and overseeing the delivery of the works.
Why does it take a commissioner to build a building full of servers? Because the real bottleneck for data centres in Italy is neither capital nor technology: it is permitting times and connections to the high- and extra-high-voltage electricity grid. A project of hundreds of megawatts has to pass through multi-agency permitting conferences (conferenze di servizi), environmental assessments and discussions with the grid operator that can take years — and in a market where demand for computing capacity is growing at the speed of generative AI, years of waiting can make a project obsolete before the first ground is broken.
The context: a small country speeding up
The figures from the Data Center Observatory of Politecnico di Milano (Osservatorio Data Center) give a measure of the starting point. Italy today has around 600 MW of operational capacity — a modest fraction of Europe's total. The Milan metropolitan area alone concentrates 68% of national capacity (414 MW) and, according to the Observatory's estimates, will pass the gigawatt mark by 2028.
The momentum, however, is strong: after around €7 billion invested over the 2023-2025 period, announcements for 2026-2028 exceed €25 billion, spread across 83 sites attributable to some thirty operators — 19 of them new entrants to the Italian market. Again according to the Observatory, Milan alone could attract almost a quarter of the investment expected across Europe's 13 main hubs.
The first programme: ‘Equinix for Italy’
The Milan programme involves seven new data centres in the municipalities of Settimo Milanese and Cusago, to be built between 2026 and 2033 with an investment of €4 billion: facilities for colocation, connectivity and computationally intensive hyperscale workloads — the typical profile of AI loads.
- Energy: requirements covered 100% by renewable sources.
- Heat recovery: thanks to a partnership with A2A, waste heat from the servers at Settimo Milanese will be fed into Milan's district heating network — up to 225 GWh of heat per year, enough to warm more than 21,000 homes. It is the same circular-economy principle that makes a data centre an energy asset for its local area, not just a consumer.
- Jobs: around 1,500 workers during construction, and more than 500 direct and indirect jobs once fully operational.
The second programme: the ‘Cavour Hyperscale Campus’ in Trino
The Piedmont project is a textbook case of industrial-site conversion: on the site of the former ‘Galileo Ferraris’ thermoelectric power station in Trino (Vercelli), idle since 2013, a campus of 300-400 MW will be built. The choice of site is no accident — it is a brownfield with two rare assets:
- a 380 kV electrical substation already connected to the national transmission grid, inherited from the power station;
- its position next to one of the largest photovoltaic farms in northern Italy, the 87.5 MW Enel Green Power plant with around 160,000 bifacial panels, flanked by a battery storage system.
The declared timetable is tight: multi-agency conference by the end of 2026, single authorisation by the end of 2027, first phase operational by the end of 2028. On the employment front, the talk is of around 1,200 workers on average during construction (with peaks above 2,000), 300-350 skilled jobs once operational and about a thousand more in the supply chain.
Three honest caveats
The ambition is well founded, but anyone who works on infrastructure knows that a whole world lies between the press release and the first powered-on rack. Three things to bear in mind:
- The gap between announcements and building sites. Over the 2023-2025 period, of €10.5 billion in announced investment, €7.1 billion materialised: 68%. The delays — the Observatory notes — were concentrated above all among new international operators, who underestimated the complexity of Italian permitting. That is precisely the problem the commissioners are meant to solve: the proof will be in the delivery.
- Geographic concentration. Milan already absorbs two thirds of national capacity, and both strategic programmes sit in the north-west quadrant. A resilient national infrastructure also needs distributed capacity — close to the industrial districts and the public authorities that use it.
- The electricity grid. Every new campus of hundreds of megawatts is a load the transmission grid must be able to serve, alongside the other 80 announced projects. Without coordinated grid reinforcement, the servers stay switched off — and this is no theoretical risk: it is already the leading cause of delays today.
Sovereignty is control, not just geography
In our article on digital sovereignty we wrote that a data centre in Europe is not enough: what matters is who controls it, to which standards, and with what way out. These two programmes move in the right direction — physical capacity on Italian soil, renewable energy, the recovery of industrial sites — and for once Italy is playing ahead of the game instead of chasing it.
But for most Italian organisations, sovereignty will not be exercised by renting a floor of a hyperscale campus: it is exercised by knowing where your data is, who administers it and under what guarantees. That is the business of private cloud within a dedicated perimeter and of designing tailor-made infrastructure — where the megawatts can be counted on your fingers, but control is total. Our zero-emission data centre has been showing for years that efficiency and sustainability are not the preserve of the hyperscalers. If this concerns you, let's talk.
Sources and references: Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (Ministero delle Imprese e del Made in Italy), press release ‘Data Center: ok Cdm a strategicità per due investimenti in Lombardia e Piemonte per 8 mld’ (24 July 2026); Data Center Observatory, Politecnico di Milano — School of Management (press release ‘Data Center: già investiti 7 miliardi nel triennio 2023-2025, ulteriori 25 previsti nel prossimo triennio’, January 2026); MilanoFinanza, ‘Data center, in Italia investimenti annunciati per 10,5 miliardi nel 2023-2025. Ma realizzati solo per 7,1 miliardi’ (January 2026). The figures for the individual programmes are drawn from the government press release and the trade press as at the date of publication.
