Digital Realty Expands Italian Footprint with New Milan Campus Development

Digital Realty Announces Major Data Center Investment in Milan

March 24, 2026

In a significant move to capture growth in one of Europe's key digital economies, global data center giant Digital Realty has announced its entry into the Milan market. The expansion underscores the strategic importance of Italy, and Milan in particular, as a critical hub for cloud, interconnection, and emerging artificial intelligence workloads demanding robust, scalable infrastructure.

The company has acquired two land parcels in Abbiategrasso, located southwest of Milan's city center, marking the first step in developing a new data center campus. The initial phase of the project targets the launch of an 8-megawatt (MW) facility in 2028. Digital Realty holds substantial expansion potential on the larger plot, with plans indicating the site could eventually support up to 84MW of total IT capacity at full build-out.

Paula Cogan, Managing Director for EMEA at Digital Realty, emphasized the strategic rationale behind the investment: "We’re excited to enter Milan, Italy’s business capital with a dynamic tech ecosystem. By expanding into Milan, we are providing much-needed infrastructure to support the city’s growth as a digital hub, fostering new content, interconnection, and cloud communities while assuring long-term capacity for AI and hyperscale deployments."

The Milan region is already a competitive landscape, hosting facilities or planned projects from numerous operators including Equinix, Data4, Vantage, and NTT, among others, and serves as a cloud region location for most major hyperscale providers. Digital Realty's move is part of a broader dual-pronged strategy in Italy. The company is concurrently developing its first Italian facility in Rome, known as ROM1. That campus, which broke ground last year, is scheduled to launch in early 2027 with 3MW of capacity. Announced in September 2023, the full 22-hectare Rome campus could span 2.3 million square feet upon completion, positioning it as one of the largest data center projects in the country.

This parallel development in Rome and Milan significantly strengthens Digital Realty's pan-European platform, offering customers increased redundancy and connectivity options across Italy's two primary economic centers. The investments are a direct response to soaring demand driven by digital transformation, cloud adoption, and the computational intensity of next-generation AI applications, which require substantial, pre-positioned power and space.

Source: datacenterdynamics