Digital Realty Milan (Abbiategrasso) data center, Lombardy, Italy

A Digital Realty company, Digital Milan 1, has asked Abbiategrasso, southwest of Milan, Italy, to let it turn the disused Ropal industrial site and the neighboring Vigevanese area, about 138,800 square meters in all, into a data center campus. The proposal, filed on August 5, 2026, is now with the town's technical offices and must go through a strategic environmental assessment in which residents and associations can comment.

Mayor Cesare Nai said the company had confirmed the servers would be cooled in a closed loop, so that no groundwater would be drawn continuously and the aquifer would not be warmed. The filing describes three buildings up to 21 meters high with 120 megawatts of electrical capacity, and about 10 million euros for the town in fees and environmental compensation.

Il Giorno reported in July a 1.3 billion euro campus of four data centers and 94 megawatts, the first 8 megawatts running from 2028, employing 150 to 200 people. Milan already has 68 data center facilities, the densest concentration in Italy. Lombardy alone has 166 new requests for grid connection totaling more than 44 gigawatts, and across Italy the operator Terna has 529 requests for roughly 95 gigawatts.

Data centers account for less than 2 percent of Italy's electricity demand today, and in the highest growth scenarios could reach 12.7 percent by 2035. Towns around Milan have begun organizing. More than 2,200 people signed a petition against a data center at San Bovio, in Peschiera Borromeo, over energy and water consumption, noise, how close it sits to houses and to the Gambarone spring, groundwater drawn from shallow aquifers, and carbon dioxide from burning diesel.

Residents of the southwest Milan area have kept up protests since a sit-in in July against a planned campus at Lacchiarella, and committees are forming ahead of the first national demonstration, set for October 10 in Milan.