“Aragon continues to move towards becoming the Virginia of southern Europe. » On October 14, Jorge Azcón, president of the regional government of Aragon, did not hesitate to compare the autonomous community in northern Spain with the state in the United States where the most data centers are concentrated. It had just announced the plan of the American investment fund Blackstone to invest 7.5 billion euros, through its subsidiary QTS Data Centers, in the construction of a large digital data storage infrastructure in the municipality of Calatorao, near Zaragoza.
With an area of 224 hectares, this center is expected to create 1,400 jobs during its first phase of development. “Aragon has talent, an enviable geographical location to produce clean energy, natural resources, industrial land in large quantities and at a very competitive price, and can count on unalterable social peace”Azcón boasted on October 14, estimating that the data center sector could generate 2% growth in gross domestic product each year for the next quarter century. Provided, however, “multiply investment in the electrical distribution network”become “a funnel”he added.
“Either we invest six times more than we have done in the last fifteen years in electrical networks or we will miss the data center revolution”insisted the director of the Spanish data center association Spain DC, Manuel Giménez, on Wednesday, November 27, during a business forum. And evaluate the amount of necessary investments at 6.6 billion euros per year until 2030, then 5.3 billion until 2040. Calculations that attest to the fervor that has taken over Spain around data storage centers .
In May, Amazon Web Services (AWS) made headlines by promising 15.7 billion euros of investment over the next ten years and the creation of 6,800 jobs to develop its three data centers in Aragon, to which new infrastructure would be added. of the same type in Zaragoza. The general director of AWS for Spain and Portugal, Suzana Curic, described this data campus as “strategic, not only for Spain, but for southern Europe.”
Many advantages
Three months earlier, in February, another American tech giant, Microsoft, revealed a plan to invest €6 billion to expand its three data centers in Madrid and build three new ones at a sprawling data campus in Aragon. Other less well-known companies also have their own projects, such as Box2Bit, from the Capital Energy group, which plans an investment of 3.4 billion euros in Cariñena, announced in June and confirmed at the end of October. In the last six months, Spain has attracted nearly €34 billion in promises of investment in data centers.
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