Infrastructure planning report: EMEA - Madrid

European Infrastructure

With surging demand, colocation data center investment in Europe is reaching record highs. According to Grand View Research, the European colocation market will expand at a CAGR of over 13% percent over the next few years to reach a value of over $30 billion by 2028.

Colocation users in the region can currently be divided in half in terms of spend: Retail colocation users are enterprises and organisations who expect a fully managed and serviced facility. Wholesale users – mainly hyperscale cloud businesses like AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft - contract core design and build and manage the fit-out and operations themselves.

GDPR, the latest set of European Union data regulations, is driving the dissemination of data into a larger number of facilities in different countries, by stipulating that data is stored in the country in which it is generated. Edge growth – the movement of data closer to the ‘edge’ of the Internet to support high-speed high-bandwidth applications such as IoT and AR/VR running on 5G networks – is also driving a new disseminated build pattern. However, the vast majority of colocation space in Europe – around 70% of capacity - is still concentrated in four cities - Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris. These top data center markets are known as the FLAP region. Between them they now offer more than 2,000 MW of capacity.

Southern Europe

While Southern Europe used to be bypassed by intercontinental connections, the situation has been changing fast, with data and supporting infrastructure CAGR exceeding that in the FLAP region at around 20%. New international gateway metros are emerging to handle increasing amounts of data from the 50 plus subsea cables that land in the south, connecting Europe to the Middle East and Asia, Africa and North and South America. The fastest-growing gateways are Marseille, Milan, Sofia and Madrid.