Retelit breaks ground on a new AI-ready, sustainable data centre in Milan Corsico
The investment plan of €350 million announced a few months ago is taking shape.
An 18,000 square metre data centre with 13.6 MW of power to support AI and digital innovation.
Retelit, Italy's leading Telco & ICT company focused on the B2B market, announces the start of construction of its new AI-ready data centre in Corsico with 13.6 MW capacity, targeting an initial release of capacity by 2027. The data centre will meet the growing demand for high-compute infrastructure and applications powered by artificial intelligence, as well as broader digital services — from cloud to edge computing.
The start of construction follows the purchase, just a few months ago, of land formerly owned by Marcegaglia, enabling the regeneration of a former industrial steelmaking area near the ring road, where two industrial warehouses and a three-storey office building once stood.
The new data centre will cover a total area of 18,000 square metres, used for the construction of two identical data centre buildings. It will be compliant with the highest hyperscaler reliability standards and built using the most advanced low-environmental-impact technologies. The project features closed-loop water cooling systems to protect the local water table, integrated with liquid cooling systems for AI server cooling — which generate up to ten times more heat than traditional servers. The data centre will also enable the recovery of waste heat for conversion into energy benefiting local households and businesses.
The Corsico data centre will be an integral part of Retelit's Avalon Campus ecosystem — Italy's largest interconnection hub, hosting over 170 operators, content delivery networks, media companies and OTTs.
With the Corsico data centre, Retelit continues to deliver on the three-year investment plan of €350 million announced last year by CEO Jorge Álvarez. In addition, the strategy includes the development of a further facility in Milan Bisceglie, repurposing already identified and acquired buildings, which will join the 38 existing owned facilities.
This network of data centres, extending across Italy from Treviso to Bari, is crucial for reducing latency while also making a significant contribution to the country's digital sovereignty — ensuring that sensitive data remains protected within physical and regulatory borders.
"We strongly believe in Italy's role as the future digital hub of the Mediterranean and we want to support this growth by investing in data centres, which are the essential pillars underpinning the technological developments tied to artificial intelligence and remain a crucial asset of our strategy", says Jorge Álvarez, CEO of Retelit. "Consistent with our past approach, we have once again chosen to build on an already developed site, combining sustainability with excellence in performance, security, reliability and efficiency".
"Data centres are strategic national infrastructure, essential to supporting progress through technology. We believe it is important that our territory has once again become attractive for high-value innovative investment, regenerating brownfield areas in keeping with environmental sustainability and through waste heat recovery fed into the district heating network — creating a virtuous model of development", states the Municipal Administration.
