The fever for artificial intelligence has unleashed another one closely linked to it: that of the construction of new data centers spread around the world. That includes our country, Spain, where we have already seen how Big Tech is going to invest more than 24 billion euros in these facilities in the next decade. They won’t be the only ones.
10 billion investors and companies here. How they reveal in The Economistthe data center sector has recorded more than 20 transactions in the last five years by private equity funds, infrastructure funds and also large telecommunications operators. Between all of them, 10,000 million euros have been mobilized, they claim in this newspaper.
Who is investing. Blackstone, a global investment fund giant, will dedicate 7.8 billion euros to a data center operated by QTS that will be located in Zaragoza, in the municipality of Calatorao. Purchase and sale operations are also moving a lot of money: the Aermont real estate fund has bought the data center company Nabiax for about 1,000 million euros. This company belonged to Telefónica and the Asterion infrastructure fund.
More operations. In El Economista they have registered up to 22 operations that have moved in this area since 2021. A little more than half are mergers or acquisitions – such as that of Telefónica and Asterion – but as we say, there are also infrastructure projects such as Blackstone in Aragon or the installation of the data center Galicia promotesof 15MW of power that It was announced in March 2023 and whose investment exceeds 400 million euros.
The ace up the sleeve of the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal have a very striking advantage when it comes to attracting investment in new data centers: surplus energy. In Spain it happens that the excess energy was being wasted or stored by electricity companies in the swamps. Now there is an opportunity to take advantage of it in these new infrastructures.
But. The announcements from big technology companies when it comes to implementing data centers in our country have not always been well received. The mayor of Lérida, Félix Larrosa, believes that these types of projects do not pay off: “they are shoe boxes, they do not contribute anything to the local economy.” For the city council, the projected job creation does not compensate in the medium term, and not only would they occupy a lot of industrial land, but they would also use an exaggerated amount of water. Not everyone is of that opinion, of course, but the debate is there.
Image | QTS
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