The American investment fund Blackstone will invest 7.5 billion euros in a data center in Aragon, a region in northeastern Spain that has become the Eldorado of digital storage in Europe, the president of the region announced on the social network “Today we announce that blackstone is coming to our region to build and manage a data center campus in Calatorao”in the suburbs of Zaragoza, wrote Jorge Azcón, adding that this project represented “an investment of up to 7.5 billion euros and the creation of 1,400 direct jobs”.
The manager estimated that this future data center, a vast warehouse where mountains of information used by companies and individuals are stored, would make Aragon “the Virginia of southern Europe”in reference to the state on the American east coast, the nerve center of the global cloud with its famous «Data center alley»where a large part of international computer data is stored. Abundant and cheap land, good connection with the economic centers of the country (Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country) and the presence of immense solar and wind farms in this territory which is both sunny and sparsely populated, Aragon is transformed into an El Dorado for data centers at a time when digital giants are forced to increase their storage capacity in the face of the enormous needs of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
At the end of May, the American giant Amazon announced a colossal investment of 15.7 billion euros, via its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), to increase the capacity of its three Aragonese data centers, installed since 2022 in industrial zones with rocky landscapes. Microsoft followed suit at the beginning of July, with a 2.2 billion euro project, bringing its total investments in the region to 6.7 billion. And according to Spanish media, the Meta group, parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is considering joining them. In the spring, the regional government of Aragon launched a vast 42-hectare technology park project in the suburbs of Zaragoza, its capital, intended to accommodate heavyweights in the sector, but also start-ups and public research centers. .
