Italy’s government is using accelerated approval procedures to support a data-centre pipeline worth more than €25 billion, placing computing capacity and energy infrastructure closer to the centre of national industrial policy.

Seven programmes have received recognition as projects of overriding national strategic interest, a status intended to coordinate public authorities and shorten the route through Italy’s fragmented approval system. The proposals range from hyperscale campuses around Milan to the conversion of former energy and mining sites in Piedmont and Sardinia.

The latest decisions include a proposed €5.3 billion campus south of Milan from K2 Strategic Infrastructure Italy and the €1.5 billion Digital Vault Sulcis programme at the former Monte Sinni coal mine in Nuraxi Figus. The Sardinian project combines an edge AI data centre with renewable generation and energy storage.

Earlier approvals covered programmes from Equinix, Vantage Data Centers, EdgeConneX, Amazon Web Services, and Italian developer Techbau. Collectively, they show Italy attempting to become a destination for the physical infrastructure behind AI and cloud services rather than concentrating its technology policy on applications and regulation alone.

Milan remains the centre of gravity

Equinix plans to invest about €4 billion in seven facilities across the Milan metropolitan area between 2026 and 2033. The company already operates four data centres in Milan and another in Genoa, with the northern city serving as Italy’s largest cloud and interconnection market.

K2’s proposed campus would add roughly 300 megawatts of capacity on Milan’s southern outskirts. The project is backed by Singapore’s Kuok Group, although it remains an assessed investment plan rather than completed infrastructure and will still require substantial work on power, land, construction, and customer commitments.

Lombardy expects to attract between €10 billion and €12 billion of approximately €22 billion in Italian data-centre investment over the next five years. Regional authorities estimate that 1.5 to 2 gigawatts of the country’s planned 3 gigawatts of new capacity could be built there.

That concentration brings advantages because facilities can connect to existing fibre networks, cloud regions, financial customers, and specialist contractors. It also increases pressure on the regional electricity system and planning authorities, while reinforcing investment around areas already rich in digital infrastructure.

Lombardy has introduced rules intended to favour brownfield redevelopment over construction on agricultural or protected land. Developers building on undeveloped sites can face higher charges, reflecting an effort to direct expansion towards industrial areas with existing infrastructure.

Old energy sites become computing sites

Outside Milan, the Cavour Hyperscale Campus would convert the former Enel Galileo Ferraris power station at Trino in Piedmont into a facility designed for cloud and AI workloads. The €4 billion programme is expected to reach between 300 and 400 megawatts of capacity.

The Piedmont regional government expects a service conference to begin by the end of 2026, with a unified authorisation targeted for 2027 and the first section entering service in 2028. Construction could employ around 1,200 people, rising above 2,000 at peak periods, while the operational site is projected to support between 300 and 350 skilled roles.

Repurposing a former power site offers potential benefits because land, grid infrastructure, and industrial access may already exist, although a data centre’s electrical requirements can differ substantially from the conditions under which the original plant operated. Developers still need firm grid connections, backup systems, cooling arrangements, and long-term energy contracts.

The Sardinian proposal follows a similar industrial-reuse model. Energy Vault is already developing a hybrid gravity and battery storage project at the Nuraxi Figus mine, supporting regional plans to turn the decommissioned coal site into a lower-carbon technology hub. The Digital Vault Sulcis programme would add computing infrastructure to that energy redevelopment.

Linking data centres directly with generation and storage could help manage some of the power constraints associated with AI workloads, but the commercial and technical model requires closer examination. Storage can shift electricity use and provide resilience, yet it cannot replace the need for sufficient generation and network capacity over sustained periods.

Strategic status does not settle the economics

Italy’s accelerated process responds to a recurring complaint from infrastructure investors: data-centre approvals cross national, regional, municipal, environmental, and energy authorities, creating uncertainty over project timescales. The strategic-interest mechanism can improve coordination, but it does not remove environmental assessments or guarantee that a proposed campus will be financed and built.

The investment totals should therefore be treated as a pipeline rather than completed expenditure. Large campuses are usually developed in phases, with later buildings dependent on customer demand, available power, construction costs, and the economics of AI services.

Attracting international infrastructure operators does not by itself produce a domestic AI industry. Data centres can create construction work, skilled operational roles, tax revenue, and improved access to computing capacity, while many of the highest-value components, cloud platforms, and services may still be supplied by companies headquartered elsewhere.

Italy will retain more economic value where the infrastructure connects with local energy businesses, telecommunications providers, universities, software companies, and industrial users. The government must also decide how the programme fits with its national cloud strategy and the treatment of sensitive public-sector data.

Energy availability remains the immediate constraint. Italy has relatively high electricity costs, while connection queues and grid investment will influence which announced sites can operate at their proposed scale. A 300-megawatt campus has the electricity demand of a substantial industrial facility, and several such developments arriving together require planning well beyond the boundary of each project.

The government’s decisions establish data centres as strategic infrastructure and give investors a clearer political route through the approval system. Whether the €25 billion-plus pipeline becomes productive capacity will depend on the less visible work that follows: substations, transmission, planning decisions, fibre routes, construction labour, and customers prepared to commit to long-term computing demand.