Seven of the ten large programs declared of national strategic interest with the Asset decree concern data centers, for a total estimated value of investments of 26.9 billion. The operators involved include giants such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, OpenAI, Equinix, Vantage and EdgeConneX.
The Committee's strategy to avoid saturation of the territories is to involve the Regions called to propose the areas, and aims to involve the Italian supply chain of components, electricity networks, generators and cooling. According to Terna, as of August 31, grid connection requests for new data centers exceeded 100 gigawatts, almost half in Lombardy.
CAIE follows 88 projects, 72 underway, for 104.7 billion from 22 countries. Looking at Italy, the South is worth 43.4 billion, i.e. 41% of the portfolio, with Sicily (16.3 billion) and Puglia (15.5) immediately after Lombardy (23.3). In the core perimeter the share exceeds 51%: 17 projects for 33 billion, with Puglia at 15 on offshore and renewable energy.
Incoming foreign direct investments reached 13.6 billion in the first half of 2026, compared to 2.8 in the whole of 2025. The almost 19 thousand foreign-controlled companies are 0.4% of the total but produce 21% of the turnover and almost 36% of exports, with 1.83 million employees and an added value per employee of 102.6 thousand euros, compared to 63.8 thousand for other companies.
Among the Committee's proposals regarding investments there are: a clause that keeps incentives for validated projects unchanged for three years, a quota reserved for foreign investments in strategic supply chains in the Sustainable Growth Fund, an authorization lane for projects between 100 million and one billion, currently excluded from Article 13, and an accelerated channel for visas and permits. An annual summit of foreign investors and, with Istat, a national observatory on greenfield investments are also proposed.
The data center can be defined as the fundamental infrastructure on which more sophisticated information processing and analysis tools are based, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning or the Internet of Things. Infrastructure has moved from traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks capable of supporting applications and workloads across multiple physical infrastructures and in a multicloud environment. Today, data resides and must be connected across multiple data centers, at the edge, and in public and private clouds. The data center must be able to communicate with multiple locations, either within the company or in the cloud. Even the public cloud can be viewed as a collection of data centers. When applications are hosted in the cloud, they use data center resources provided by the cloud service provider.
The challenge for Italian data centers is to be able to transform announcements into operational infrastructures. The 2026 market research by Ida, the association of builders and operators, presented at the Data Center Symposium in Rome, quantified the possible cumulative infrastructure investments between 2026 and 2036 at around 37 billion. An estimate linked to the full activation of qualified projects, with forecasts that depend on available energy, connections to the grid, authorisations, skills and suitable sites. The starting point is an IT capacity installed at the end of 2025 of approximately 760 megawatts: 460 commercial and 300 in business centers. For the commercial market the trajectory indicates 2-2.3 gigawatts by 2031.
