Reuters has reported that Microsoft is planning to invest €6.69 billion Spain’s Aragon region to build a new data centre that will serve the country and surrounding areas. The area is becoming a hub for cloud providers and recently Amazon announced it would be building a data centre there.
It should be noted that Microsoft has not commented on its potential investment in Aragon yet but the regional government has said that Microsoft has applied for a construction permit to build a site outside of Zaragoza; presumably, Microsoft is waiting on the regional government to approve this permit.
In May, Amazon said it would be pouring €15.7 billion into the Aragon region on its data centre site and claimed this would create 17,500 full-time equivalent jobs in local businesses on an average annual basis through to 2033. It also said that this site and resulting employment would contribute €21.6 billion to the country’s GDP over the same timespan.
At the time of the announcement, Amazon said that Spain was an attractive location because of the climate and energy conditions. Amazon said that its data centres are powered by 100% renewable energy and that they were aligned with the government’s new AI Government Strategy.
Regarding the energy situation in Aragon, Reuters says that Spain’s fifth biggest city, Zaragoza, has a lot of wind energy capacity enabling firms like Amazon and Microsoft to plug in their servers without creating carbon emissions. The city is also a logistics and transportation hub situated half way between Madrid and Barcelona and in the middle of the main trade route between Spain, France, and the rest of the continent.
Hopefully we will get confirmation from Microsoft about the data centre once it gets approval from the regional government concerned with the issuance of the permit for the site.
Source: Reuters