Data Centers, energy and GDP: Italy faces a window worth over €25 billion

Digital infrastructure has become the new raw material of national competitiveness. But the factor that separates a profitable investment from a fragile one is neither the concrete nor the servers: it is energy, and the ability to manage it through digital tools. A reflection for those who take the decisions, those who put up the capital, and those who measure their success by their citizens’ quality of life.

Our colleague Giuseppe Franceschelli, Head of Strategic Relationships and Alliances at Maps Group, explores the central role of data centers in the digitalisation of the energy sector, focusing on the economic and strategic opportunities for decision-makers, investors and those who measure success through citizens’ quality of life.

Data centers: the new strategic infrastructure of the Italian economy

There is an infrastructure in Italy that almost no citizen ever sees, yet on which their bank, their medical records, their job, their tax return, the app they use to park and the video call that spared them a journey all now depend. It is the data center: the silent factory of the digital economy.

A century ago, a nation’s competitiveness was measured in railways, ports and electricity. Those who built them first, and ran them best, drew in industry, jobs and capital. Today that same strategic role is played by computing infrastructure.

In a phrase worth more than a thousand reports, the newly appointed president of the Italian Datacenter Association (IDA), Luca Beltramino, said it best: “Without data centers there is no artificial intelligence, and without artificial intelligence there is no future.” This is no slogan: it is a snapshot of a value chain whose first link is physical, energy-hungry and located on our own soil.

Data center investment in Italy: €25 billion expected by 2029 and 80 projects already announced

When a trade association is founded by eight members and within a few years gathers more than 250, it means the market understood before the politicians did. IDA today represents the country’s leading data-center builders and operators, and the figures it brings to the table with the Government are not promises: they are capital on the move.

Over the past three years more than €7 billion has already been invested in Italy in the sector. That is the present, not the future. And the outlook ahead is wider still: industry estimates converge on spending of the order of €21.8 billion over the next five years for the construction and fit-out of the new centres alone — not counting IT equipment and operating costs — while the Politecnico di Milano’s Observatory puts at around €25 billion the volume of investment between 2026 and 2029, with more than 80 projects already announced.

To this is added a figure that speaks the language of those who govern a territory: installed capacity, 287 MW in 2024, is set to exceed 2 GW by 2031, growth of more than 600%. And as capacity grows, so do jobs: from just over a thousand full-time staff in the new hubs today, the figure is expected to reach around 6,000 by 2029, with knock-on employment of almost 14,000 people across the supply chain — construction, plant engineering, energy, security, telecommunications and services.

Here is the word that should interest anyone thinking about GDP: the knock-on effect. A data center is not a shed that closes in on itself. It is a building site that calls on construction, an energy bill that calls on the power sector, a fibre link that calls on the telcos, a maintenance contract that calls on skilled services for twenty years. It is, on a digital scale, what a port or a motorway was to the twentieth century: a multiplier.

Energy monitoring software for data centers: making the difference by turning data into operational decisions

Here comes the point that the manager, the entrepreneur, the public administrator — outstanding in their own field, but not necessarily a digital specialist — must bring into focus before signing a cheque.

Data centers are among the most energy-intensive infrastructures in existence. They draw power not only to run the servers, but to cool them, to distribute the current and to guarantee service continuity twenty-four hours a day. And with AI, which demands ever greater computing density, that demand grows further still.

Let me explain it with a comparison anyone can grasp. Buying a data center without a system to manage its energy is like buying a car and looking only at the engine size and the bodywork, never at the fuel consumption. Two identical cars, on the same road, can cost you twice as much in fuel depending on how they are set up and how you drive them.

For a data center, the “fuel” — energy — is the largest and most volatile operating cost. It means that much of the return on your investment is decided not on opening day, but on every single day of the twenty years that follow — on the bill.

And there is a second reason, not technical but regulatory: Europe is making mandatory the monitoring of consumption and efficiency indicators. PUE (how much energy actually goes into computing and how much is lost), WUE for water, ERF for heat recovery and REF for renewables are becoming the benchmark against which an asset will be valued, financed and authorised. Those who cannot measure will not be bankable tomorrow.

Energy monitoring software for data centers: turning data into operational decisions that make a difference

This is where digitalisation comes in, and it is the heart of the matter. Because an efficiency indicator is only as good as the data beneath it: if collection is fragmented, unreliable and done by hand once a month, even the most sophisticated KPI becomes a number with no value for decision-making.

The BRAINWATT® software platform from Maps Energy was created precisely to bridge this gap: to turn energy data — today scattered across plants, meters and different systems — into structured information on which to base decisions. Continuous monitoring, integration of heterogeneous systems, the construction of reliable KPIs (PUE, WUE, ERF, REF), automatic anomaly detection, consumption optimisation, and support for audits and ISO 50001 compliance.

Let me return to the car analogy, because it is the one that works with people who are not specialists. BrainWatt is the data center’s smart sat-nav and dashboard: it tells you in real time how much you are consuming, where you are wasting, when a component is “pulling” harder than it should and is signalling a fault, and which route gets you to your destination for less.

It does not replace your decision: it puts you in a position to take it with the numbers in hand, rather than on a hunch. In this way you move, as the sector’s own logic neatly puts it, from monitoring to decision.

Energy efficiency in data centers: four tangible benefits for investors and operators

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of whoever has to approve that project. They are not paid to understand the physics of cooling: they are paid to deliver the result they invested for. And managing energy with a digital platform works on exactly those results:

• It protects the return. By cutting the largest and most unpredictable cost item, it defends the operating margin and therefore the expected return over the whole life of the asset.
• It reduces risk. Anomaly detection turns sudden failures — the thing an investor fears most, because they mean downtime and penalties — into planned maintenance.
• It makes the asset bankable and “ESG-compliant”. In a market where energy efficiency and transparency of consumption weigh ever more heavily in financing decisions, having certifiable data is not a frill: it is what opens access to capital.
• It guards against regulation. Those who equip themselves with measurement tools today will not be chasing European obligations tomorrow: they will already have met them.

In a word: energy efficiency is no longer merely a technical objective, it is a competitive factor and a source of value for the investment.

New data center hubs in Italy: mapping the regions from Milan to Bologna, from Rome to Palermo

Here the discussion leaves abstraction behind and touches the regions. The map of Italy’s data centers is no longer a single dot. Milan remains the heart — it concentrates infrastructure, connectivity and skills, and on its own attracts the largest share of investment — but the Lombardy network is now close to saturation, and growth is redistributing itself down the peninsula.

Rome has become the second hub: Digital Realty has launched ROM1, redeveloping a former Acea site of 22 hectares chosen near the coast precisely to connect to the submarine cables, while Aruba has invested in a dedicated campus. Turin hosts a Google cloud region and several TIM Enterprise hubs. Bologna is set to host one of the continent’s leading “AI Factories”. In Lombardy, at Ferrera Erbognone (Pavia), Eni will build a 1 GW “AI-ready” data center powered by low-emission energy.

And then there is the Mezzogiorno, which is turning from periphery into frontier: Puglia has launched its “Data Center Valley”, three hyperscale campuses set to exceed 2 GW; Palermo, Naples and Bari, landing points for the new Mediterranean submarine cables, are now attracting both Italian and international capital.

This realignment also makes room for Genoa. Its location and the landing of international submarine cables make it a candidate to become a digital hub of the Mediterranean, a crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia — and it is no coincidence that Terna has listed the Genoa metropolitan area among the zones where the electricity grid is to be reinforced precisely to support the integration of new data centers. It is proof that, where connectivity and energy exist, opportunity opens up. But it is also where the real knot lies: without available, well-managed energy, none of these regions — Genoa among them — will turn its candidacy into reality.

Efficient data centers and local communities: services for citizens, jobs, digital sovereignty and waste heat recovery

Because all of this, in the end, is not an end in itself. The end point of a piece of strategic infrastructure is not the balance sheet of whoever builds it: it is the lives of those who live around it.

An efficient data center, well managed and rooted in its territory, means skilled jobs that do not emigrate, lower emissions for the same level of service, data sovereignty for citizens, under European jurisdiction; and public services — digital healthcare, schools, administration — that are faster and more reliable. In some cases it even means heat: in Milan there are already operators recovering the data center’s waste heat to feed the urban district-heating network, warming homes with what would otherwise be lost. It is the knock-on effect in its noblest form: a technology that, well managed, gives back to the community more than it takes.

And it is here that the three figures I am addressing meet. The decision-maker who wants results, the investor who wants returns, the administrator who wants the good of their citizens are in fact pursuing the same goal from different angles. An efficient digital infrastructure satisfies all three at once: it produces wealth, it returns margin, it improves lives.

Italy and the €25 billion data center opportunity: shaping it or being shaped by it?

Italy faces a window of opportunity worth tens of billions that will not stay open for long: European competition is moving fast, and capital flows to wherever it finds clear rules and demonstrable efficiency. We can be the country that is swept along by this wave, or the one that rides it by taking control of it.

Equipping yourself with the tools to measure, understand and optimise the energy of your data centers is no longer, as the sector neatly sums it up, an optional choice: it is the necessary condition for managing modern infrastructure effectively. It is the difference between signing off an investment and signing off an investment that works.

And that difference, today, is called digitalisation.