Emerging as a pivotal data hub in the Mediterranean, Italy has become very prevalent in the global data ecosystem and is growing quickly.

As demand for resilient and geographically diverse connectivity continues to boom across Europe, Italy is benefitting from its unique location and its investment into next-generation data centre ecosystems. This is inevitably driving new opportunities for international operators.

“Indeed, it’s evolving,” Giancarlo Giacomello told Capacity at Capacity Europe 2025. “We’re seeing it at a high pace – an incredible, attention-focused journey right now. Italy is transitioning from what was considered a market of secondary importance in Europe to something where all the major players are increasingly focusing their efforts and attention.”

Looking beyond FLAP-D

As an Italian leader in cloud, data centre and digital services, Aruba S.p.A. has been eager to highlight the country’s growing position as a powerhouse for European digital infrastructure.

With more than 30 years of experience, the company has evolved into one of Europe’s foremost IT and cloud service providers, combining its strategic expansion with a powerful commitment to sustainability.

For Aruba, Italy is only getting stronger.

“You can see this incredible growth in demand and supply. The energy destined for data centres is growing quite significantly, mainly in the Milan area,” Giacomello explained. “We’re trying to build an alternative in Italy by investing heavily in our campus in Rome, because we’re seeing this happening already in other countries – just think about what’s happening in France or Germany. We wanted to be a bit ahead of the curve on this, but it’s clear Italy is growing as a market to quickly become another Tier I market.”

Giacomello told us that Italy is currently getting plenty of attention because traditional FLAP-D markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin) are starting to become saturated. The intensity means that requests are intensifying and inevitably impacting power grids, making it harder to find new capacity in these areas.

“Italy always comes a little after, but in this case, it was a natural expansion,” Giacomello noted. “We’re witnessing a transition from data centres scaled at tens of megawatts up to hundreds of megawatts.

“We’re going to see in the next years if Italian infrastructure is capable of supporting that.”

Scaling up to meet demand

To expand its capabilities, Aruba has adopted a carrier-neutral approach to its work. The company’s flagship data centre campuses in Bergamo and Rome form a nationwide network and connect to both major national and international hubs.

“This approach is crucial to allow our customers to be completely free while choosing our services for colocation or enterprise services,” Giacomello said. “They know that they can make use of our high-quality infrastructures without limiting their capabilities.”

He added: “The more carriers we can host in our data centre facilities, the better. We can improve customer experience by establishing new routes and improve the redundancy of the lines reaching our data centres, so it’s a win-win for us and the customer.”

Aruba’s Bergamo campus spans 200,000 square metres and benefits from proximity to Milan’s connectivity hub, in addition to offering independent fibre paths to Switzerland and Frankfurt.

Additionally, the newly inaugurated campus in Rome has capacity for 30MW of IT power and is designed to strengthen Aruba’s presence in Europe and enhance interconnection. As submarine cables like BlueMed land in the city, the campus will prove instrumental in establishing Rome as a new connectivity hub in the Mediterranean.

“We’re working with several providers, trying to diversify as much as we can – not only by land but also through submarine cables like BlueMed,” Giacomello said. “There is huge attention on the data centre industry now and the Italian government felt like it was a great opportunity for the country to catch this interest.”

Driving impactful digital change

Sustainable growth remains essential to Aruba’s philosophy and is working to balance growing AI and cloud workloads with its renewable energy commitments. The company leverages renewable resources across its sites, from photovoltaic installations to hydroelectric plants.

Giacomello added: “We are among the founding members of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact and I sit on the board. We heavily invest in renewable facilities and own more than 50 gigawatt-hours of solar panels on our facilities, alongside eight hydroelectric power plants. We truly believe this is a great way to also make our business self-sufficient.”

With challenges like AI inevitably impacting the wider market, it is becoming more difficult to counterbalance and source power with renewables as the scale of data centres grows. As Aruba continues to expand its reach, it hopes to reinforce Italy as a key European connectivity bridge and as a leader in sustainable, future-ready data centre innovation.

“Continuing to invest in new facilities is helping us to scale, so we’re keeping pace. The more we buy renewable facilities, the more we produce, the more our energy demand increases,” Giacomello explained.

“In Europe right now, we are stuck to a traditional way of making data centres, so it will be interesting to see how this will be transformed in the next following years. I believe there are needs for balance between the performance capabilities of GPUs and actual infrastructures.”

With this in mind, Aruba is looking to develop the market so that the industry can finalise these two approaches quickly and clearly in order to close a critical traditional challenge – the uncertainty in permitting timelines.

“That is a huge gap right now,” Giacomello noted. “If they manage to make something clear that works well, we can continue with the great opportunities that we’re facing right now.”

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