Data centre plan strengthens Malaga's technology position with 279-million-euro investment

Jesús Hinojosa

Malaga

Thursday, 8 May 2025, 16:33

Malaga's importance on the national technological scene is once again evident in a project plan submitted to the city council and which the municipal urban planning department has included in its business accelerator unit due to its importance in terms of business investment and job creation. The project involves the construction of a large data processing centre on a 17,000-square-metre plot located on Calle Canadá, on El Viso industrial estate near the Teatinos campus.

Behind this project is Box2Bit, a subsidiary of the company Capital Energy, which in recent years has announced the construction of three other similar, but larger, data centres in Aragon and Castilla-La Mancha, worth 6.3 billion euros. According to SUR, the Malaga data centre would require an investment of 279 million euros and would generate around 80 permanent jobs, as well as over 450 other jobs during its construction.

The city's planning department (Urbanismo) stresses that this data processing centre is of strategic value to the city "due to the nature of its business, production, technological innovation, economic volume and improved employment levels." This data processing centre, dubbed Olive Urban, will play a key role due to its geographical location, as it will act as a data gateway from southern Spain to the rest of the country and Europe.

This facility will house powerful servers for data storage, network equipment and security systems to store, process and distribute digital information. To this end, the company is filing a formal request with Urbanismo to modify the conditions given in the city's plans (PGOU) for this plot of land. Specifically, it aims to change the layout, avoiding the need to build a street that splits the site in two and serves as an extension of the Calle Quito axis, thereby crossing the channeled Las Cañas stream with a bridge.

For this project, the ideal would be to construct a single, compact building capable of housing the powerful servers that this centre will have. However, in order to improve the connections on this site, the construction of a bridge is planned to widen the axis of Calle Canadá over the existing stretch of stream parallel to Calle Rosamunda, which connects Avenida de Ortega y Gasset with the Guadalhorce valley motorway.

The proposal presented to Urbanismo consists of a building of some 15,000 square metres (the PGOU allows it to reach a height of three or four storeys), of which 12,770 square metres will be used for data storage equipment and 2,250 square metres for admin purposes. Photovoltaic panels and an electricity substation are also planned so that the centre can be powered by renewables.

In recent years, Box2Bit has announced the construction of three data centres in Aragon and Castilla-La Mancha. However, construction work has not yet started, as it is still awaiting resolution of various urban planning procedures. In the case of Aragon, it announced last year the opening of a data centre in the town of Cariñena (Zaragoza), with an investment of 3.4 billion euros, creating 350 new jobs. In Castilla-La Mancha the company submitted plans to build two more data centres in 2022, one in Torija (Guadalajara) and the other in Recas (Toledo), with an investment of 2.9 billion euros and an estimated 400 jobs.

However, these projects, which are larger than the one planned in Malaga, have not yet materialised. For example, the Torija project will occupy a site of 112,000 square metres. What does seem clear is the commitment of this subsidiary of Capital Energy to promote these actions, within the dynamic undertaken by this company to divest itself of its renewable energy projects, focusing more on data centres, a segment in which Malaga has gained an important role in recent years.

Capital Energy is in the midst of a crisis due to falling energy prices and difficulties in accessing financing. It has opted to withdraw from its roots - the wind farm and photovoltaic business - and focus its efforts on data centre development.