DC Ecosystem Italy
The giants of the Cloud & Tech world, in addition to data centre providers, deliver services and applications through huge platforms installed in new generation data centres equipped with tens of MW of power.
The so-called Hyperscalers and Colocators are changing the paradigm of IT service delivery, offering companies the possibility not to inflate their internal IT infrastructure, but to use the services and applications of platforms provided by third-party data centers. This allows for data centralization and improvement, leading to increased efficiency of the hardware and software systems in use.
As the consumption of IT & Cloud services increases, it becomes necessary to increase the number of nodes and bring them geographically closer to the users.
Although we are witnessing a rapid wave of deployment and new builds of large datacenters in Europe – especially in the FLAP area (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris), this is not enough and there is a need to expand into new geographic areas including Southern Europe in order to streamline the end-user experience by increasing the speed of response through latency reduction.
In this sense, Italy, with a focus on Milan, is moving to become one of southern Europe’s digital hubs together with Madrid.
This implies attracting all the players in the value chain of the digital economy, building an ecosystem that includes the necessary infrastructures, both telecommunications and datacentres, the basic hardware and software on which the new services, related to cloud technology, IoT, 5G, artificial intelligence, among others, are implemented.
This ecosystem creates an attractive effect that can generate employment, economic growth, investment, innovation and an increased supply of digital services for the nation.
In this context, data centres play a key role, being the first link in the value chain of this virtuous circle. These centres are the meeting point between the various actors in the chain and the foundation on which the entire digital economy is built.
Italy enjoys a strategic geographic position as it has submarine cables that reach our coasts and allow connection via the Mediterranean infrastructure with several continents (North and South America, Africa, the Middle East…). Moreover, the development of fibre optics installed in Italy contributes to optimising connectivity.
Secondly, Milan, with its strong position as Italy’s economic capital, is able to attract large datacenters due to the large presence of local and international corporations, thus stimulating demand for this type of service in significant quantities and supporting investment.
The demand for data centre services is increasing. According to CBRE’s market research, Milan has an installed capacity of about 100MW at the sites of the main data centre operators with a significant growth potential in the short to medium term. Part of this pipeline is already under construction or planned to be built in the coming months for the entire Milan hinterland area.
Italy is among the countries with the highest growth in Europe in terms of datacentres, growth due to the expected opening of new cloud regions in the country.
Overall, the sector has the capacity to attract large direct investments in datacentre-related infrastructures over the next five years, estimated at around EUR 2,800 million by 2026 with a CAGR of 3.80%. These investments generate quality employment, estimated at 30-40,000 direct and indirect jobs and a significant contribution to national GDP.
