CyrusOne Breaks Ground on Major Milan Data Center Campus, Marking Italian Market Entry

CyrusOne Breaks Ground on Major Milan Data Center Campus, Marking Italian Market Entry March 26, 2026 CyrusOne has commenced construction on its inaugural Italian data center, a significant move that expands the KKR-owned operator's footprint into a key Southern European digital hub and underscores the strategic importance of the Milan region for hyperscale and enterprise demand. The company broke ground this week on the first building, named MIL1, located in the Municipality of Segrate in East Milan. This three-story facility is designed to deliver 27 megawatts of IT capacity across 7,000 square meters (75,345 square feet) of technical space, with its first phase scheduled to be operational by the third quarter of 2027. The development is part of a larger campus plan on an 18.5-acre site, which will also host a second planned building, MIL2, with a capacity of 54MW. Andreas Paduch, Managing Director, Europe at CyrusOne, stated, “Milan is an increasingly important digital infrastructure market for Southern Europe, and this development marks a key milestone in our European growth strategy. With MIL1, we are establishing a strong platform in Milan to support our customers’ long-term capacity and connectivity needs.” Paduch credited the project's launch to collaboration with local partners, including the Segrate municipality. The campus is being developed on the former site of CISE (Centro Informazioni Studi Esperienze), a nuclear research center decommissioned in 2003, which CyrusOne acquired from Europea2000. The project represents a substantial urban regeneration effort. CyrusOne is investing approximately €6 million ($6.94 million) in local infrastructure, including transforming Via delle Regioni into a modern boulevard, and has gifted a 700,000-square-meter parkland, Golfo Agricolo, to the community. Mayor of Segrate Paolo Micheli emphasized the project's local impact, saying, “An investment of this magnitude enhances the area, as it finally allows for the regeneration of a vast, problematic industrial area that has been abandoned for decades, replacing it with a prestigious project with a lower environmental impact.” The MIL1 facility is designed with sustainability in mind, incorporating systems to recover and reuse waste heat for on-site ancillary spaces, with potential future integration into a district heating network. This entry into Italy solidifies CyrusOne's presence across Europe's major FLAPD markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin), now extended to include Madrid and Milan. It signals intensifying competition and investment in Italy's digital infrastructure, transforming a historic research site into a modern data hub poised to serve growing regional cloud and connectivity needs. Source: datacenterdynamics